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?�
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‘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?’
For about one second, Rocky observed, his moral authority held, one slim young man facing the burly worker, and the crowd of his buddies. For one second Rocky thought he might get away with this.
And then a lump of concrete came whirling in from the crowd, missing Stan’s head by inches. ‘Get the little prick!’
There was a roar, and everybody seemed to surge forward.
Rocky lost sight of Martha, and was swept forward with the rest. But he started to fight back, shoving and pushing his way towards Stan.
And suddenly those two Arbiters were at his side, flanking him, using their shoulders in a coordinated effort to bring him through the crush. In a moment they were over Stan, who was on the ground, having evidently taken a couple of punches, but grinning up at them.
The female Arbiter said to Rocky, ‘You’re his friend?’
‘Yeah—’
‘Get him out of here.’
Rocky reached down and grabbed Stan’s hand.
But Stan, still grinning, said, ‘Leave it to me.’
And for Rocky the world fell away – the sunlight, the pressing crowd, the smell of dust and wet concrete, as if he’d tumbled down a rabbit hole – as Stan dragged him stepwise.
13
RESPONDING TO ROBERTA Golding’s summons, the four Next met in a farmhouse in another footprint of Miami, only a few worlds away from the LETC construction site. The house was just a few decades old yet long abandoned, and the marsh had already reclaimed the ground the vanished pioneers had roughly cleared. For Roberta Golding, at least it offered a welcome relief from the intensity of the sun.
Nobody knew they were here. The Next hid away, in the worlds of dim-bulb humanity.
They were due for a regular update meeting anyhow, which was why Roberta was in this part of the Long Earth, far from the Grange. But after the incident at the Bootstrap site with Stan Berg and the kobold, Melinda Bennett had requested an earlier session. Melinda was one of the two Arbiters who had come to the aid of Stan Berg and Rocky Lewis; the other, here too in his sweat-stained green uniform, was called Gerd Schulze.
The fourth person here today was Marvin Lovelace, the card sharp.
Marvin spoke first. ‘He’s obviously a candidate. The boy Stan Berg. Without even trying he was five, six, seven steps ahead of those construction workers in the game. With poker you need emotional intelligence, of course, you need to be able to read people. It was as if they were showing him their hands . . .’
He spoke in English, not quicktalk. They all did here. On Low Earths, the crowded worlds close to the Datum, there was always a chance of some kind of eavesdropping. Even in a property like this, apparently abandoned, there could be a low-power cam left running by some opportunistic peeping tom, for instance. It was frustrating to talk so slowly, as if they were spelling out words with a baby’s lettered wooden blocks. But they had to communicate somehow; they had to take a chance.
Gerd said now, ‘He has emotional intelligence, maybe, but not maturity. He put himself at risk by charging into that crowd of bozos around the kobold.’
Roberta took off her spectacles and rubbed tired eyes. She was over thirty years old now; even among the Next, she reflected, maybe age was necessary for true wisdom. She remembered very well her own adolescence. She’d been only a little younger than Stan when she’d travelled on a Chinese twain into the far Long Earth, with all its wonders and horrors. Unable to look away – unable not to understand – she had cried herself to sleep, most nights. ‘Are you mocking him, Gerd? Berg’s instinct, however uneducated, may be better than yours. What was it you called the others – “bozos”?’
Marvin folded his arms. ‘I reckon he was bluffing. Like in his poker. I think he knew he’d be saved.’
Melinda asked, ‘Who by? Us?’
Marvin said, ‘It’s possible. Maybe he’s guessed the true nature of the Arbiters – or at least has some unconscious suspicion about you.’ The Arbiters, a purely voluntary force recruited from amongst themselves by the Next, worked to keep the peace on the Low Earths, in the general absence of police support after the post-Yellowstone implosion of Datum America. ‘I sometimes think you’re a bit too obvious, you guys in your green uniforms, wandering around the dim-bulb worlds, sorting things out.’
Gerd snorted. ‘Whereas it’s morally acceptable for you to fleece them at gambling games?’
Marvin held up his hands. ‘I’m here to follow our consensus aims, just like you. Even if it doesn’t always seem wise to me. We went to the Grange in the first place as a refuge from these people, our mother culture, who put a bunch of Next kids in a high-tech concentration camp on Hawaii, and then considered bombing Happy Landings, our garden of Eden. Now here we are, out again, infiltrating their culture . . . Anyhow the dim-bulbs don’t get suspicious about gambling. They almost expect you to be smarter than they are, almost expect you to cheat. High finance is the same, by the way.’
Which of course was why Marvin himself was a good agent, a good contact for recruitment. Next-candidate types like Stan were often drawn to gambling for the rare opportunities it offered in dim-bulb worlds to use their superior intellects to make some money. When they came, Marvin was in a prime site to spot them.
Roberta nodded. ‘Your work’s understood, Marvin. And appreciated. But you know as well as I do that the debate is fluid. Some say we shouldn’t intervene at all, even in the most gross cases. And at the other extreme there is the Greening, the idea that we should work to restore humans to their wild state.’ Which some Next theorists argued was something like humanity’s Middle Stone Age, a pre-farming, pre-metals age of small wandering bands. All humans needed, some Next argued – all they needed to turn the Long Earth into a true Long Utopia – was a little gentle nudging from their intellectual superiors. Which, sceptics pointed out, when the cities broke up and the governments dissolved and humanity became a race of transient wanderers, would leave the Next in a position of permanent control . . .
Marvin folded his arms. ‘So if we’re unsure of our goals, why are we working on West 4 at all? Why the hell are we helping them build these big new space programmes? Some of them seem to be groping spontaneously, in fact, for something like the Greening. Look at the “combers”. And you have workers out there in Miami 4 protesting because they think the slow pace of the project is the fault of their inadequate bosses. We know it’s not. It’s not even anything economic, financial, political. We know the problem is that human industrial society is softening at the edges. The lifestyle they call “comber” is just too tempting; especially after an accident or some such, you get swathes of workers just downing tools and walking away to go pick fruit. People don’t have to work like this, and
, increasingly, they just won’t. So why are we here?’
Roberta sighed. ‘Because these Low Earths still have large populations, after the Yellowstone emigrations. Declining, but still large. They must stay organized on large scales just to feed their own people. And because, for now, they can do this, and we can’t. We need the benefits too.’ The Next were still few in number, their direct technological capability limited. ‘We rely on high-tech goods of all kinds. Frankly, we’re parasitical on the Low Earth cultures for such goods. So, until we have a better solution of our own, we let this run – and encourage it, subtly.’
‘Hmm,’ said Marvin. ‘You know, they tell a joke, the dim-bulbs. “Doctor, doctor, my brother-in-law thinks he’s a tom cat.” “Well,” says the doc, “bring him in to see me and I’ll cure him.” “I can’t,” says the guy. “We need him to keep down the mice.” That’s what you’re saying about the dim-bulbs. These guys are crazy, a pathology. It would be kinder to let them all wander off, back into the forest where they came from. But we won’t let them be cured, because we need them to keep down the mice.’ He laughed softly.
Gerd said, ‘Well, we need to make a decision about this boy, Stan Berg. Whether or not he knows already what he is – and I have a feeling he does – we may need to get him out of here and to the Grange for his own protection.’
Roberta nodded. ‘I agree. You’re right. I’ll break cover and talk to Stan and his family when he returns. Where did he go, by the way?’
Marvin shrugged, and the Arbiters looked blank.
14
AMONG HIS OTHER attributes, Stan was a much better stepper than Rocky, and as usual Rocky had found the latest plummet, across three worlds in a matter of seconds, hard to take.
He had landed in Miami West 1 doubled over and retching. At least there was nobody around to see it, even if they were standing in the heart of a sprawling development of vast concrete shells. This was a virtual-reality theatre – evidently, he saw from the signs, a conservation project of the post-Yellowstone Museum of the Datum movement.
The Long Utopia Page 9