Stan rubbed his back. ‘You OK, buddy? Come on, let’s get out of the sun.’
He led Rocky a couple of blocks – they saw nobody around – and pushed open a swing door into a cavernous empty space. Rocky glimpsed sheer concrete walls, roughly finished.
Then, without warning, the virtual-reality simulation kicked in. Suddenly it was as if he was outdoors again: he was in some dismal snow-bound city, under a leaden sky. An artificial wind blew in from somewhere, and it was cold. Like Stan, he was dressed only in light stepwise-Earth Florida-summer’s-day gear; he was immediately shivering, and he wrapped his arms around his chest. ‘Where the hell’s this supposed to be? Some place on the Datum, right?’
‘Yep. In England. You’ve heard of England? Welcome to the volcano winter. Come on, something to show you. Not far.’ Stan hurried off through deserted streets.
Rocky, shivering like he’d break, had no choice but to follow.
They followed fading brown signs labelled ‘Medieval City’. An outer belt of modern development – modern for pre-Yellowstone anyhow, all concrete and glass and houses in neat little rows, all abandoned, some burned out – gave way to an inner core of narrower streets, older buildings of stone and brick, and, towering over it all, a tremendous spire, slim, very tall, elegant, glimpsed here and there through gaps in the rows of roofs. The buildings here were mostly terraces, crowding the roads like rows of ageing teeth, and they had evidently been rebuilt and reused, some still residential but others converted into boarding houses or cafés or tourist-trap shops – and all of them were now boarded up and abandoned. There was a sense of great age, of generations having lived and died here, reworking the building stock over and over. It was all utterly alien to Rocky. Miami West 4, the community he’d grown up in, had few buildings older than he was.
They came into a kind of square, of ice-bound mud that might once have been grass-covered. And there before them, standing alone, topped by that great spire, was a cathedral, huge, its proportions distorted by their perspective from the ground – like a spaceship of stone, Rocky thought, that had just landed here.
Stan led him forward confidently. Set in a wall of elaborately carved stone was a heavy wooden door, which Stan pushed open; it was evidently unlocked. And then they were inside the cathedral. There was an immediate hush, a sense of even deeper age. Rocky had never been in such a building before in his life.
They walked down the cross-shaped building’s long axis. Pillars of stone stood in tall rows, supporting arches which in turn held up a fantastically ornate roof. Rocky saw that the building itself was intact, more or less – even the great stained-glass windows were still complete – but the contents had been more or less stripped, leaving the long stone floor bare. Maybe the benches for the congregations that must once have gathered here had been taken for firewood. The whole thing must be built of nothing but stone and wood, Rocky thought, but it looked light as air.
Stan asked, ‘You understand this is all a recent capture?’
‘Sure.’ That was the point of the Museum of the Datum movement, to preserve what was left of the cultural treasures of the mother world before they were lost in the post-Yellowstone abandonment. Portable treasures, art works for instance, were shipped stepwise, on people’s backs or by twains, but buildings, whole city centres, could only be ‘saved’ as virtual-reality recordings.
Stan said, ‘So you know where you are yet?’
‘Disneyland?’
‘Heretic. This is a place called Salisbury. Abandoned, like most of the rest of England. You can see the looters spared the cathedral, for reasons of their own. People do have values, even when they’re hungry and cold.’
‘I’m hungry and cold.’
The two of them sat on the floor by one wall, huddling for warmth. People had been building fires on the stone floor at the very heart of the old church, Rocky saw, where the long axis met the crosspiece, directly under the spire; the floor there was scorched, the ceiling stained with smoke.
‘I guess you come here a lot,’ Rocky said.
‘How could I not? You have to go to the Datum for the really great old buildings, volcano winter or not. Some of the cathedrals and mosques and such are still in use over there. People go back to worship. In Barcelona, for instance, in Spain. The churches and mosques in Istanbul. This is my favourite, of all I’ve visited. All the better for being empty. It won’t last for ever, though. That spire’s just stone on a wooden frame. Somebody needs to keep it maintained.’
‘Why do you care about these places, Stan? I thought you despised religion. I remember when that preacher came around the beanstalk site going on about the Pope. You made him cry!’
‘I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they’re all but meaningless. I despise the division religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet . . . Don’t you see it, Rock? Look at this place – imagine building this with nothing but thirteenth-century tools. Not only that, they kept on building it, generation after generation, lives of toil devoted to a single purpose. And look at what they made! Why, it was as ambitious in its day as a Linsay beanstalk is now. In a place like this you can reject the answers those builders accepted, you can even reject the questions they asked, but you have to cherish the urge to ask such sublime questions in the first place.’
Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, Rocky sensed a huge distance between himself and his lifelong friend – a distance that only seemed to be widening as they grew up. Yet he knew he could never abandon Stan. It wasn’t just friendship, or loyalty, he was starting to realize. It was something more than that.
A kind of dazzling.
He blurted, ‘Stan, sometimes you scare me.’
Stan looked at him, genuinely puzzled. ‘Really? I don’t mean to. I’m sorry. You’re a good friend. But if you’re scared, why are you here?’
Because I can’t help it, was Rocky’s only answer. ‘Listen, I’m cold. Shall we get out of here?’
‘In a while.’ Stan stared up into the elegant spaces of the cathedral, his expression emptying, as if his mind was soaring up like a bird.
When they did step back home, they emerged into warm evening sunshine.
They strolled home; their families had neighbouring apartments in a rough dormitory development on the edge of the beanstalk facility. They reached Stan’s home first – but Martha asked Rocky to come in for a moment.
Inside, sitting with Martha, was a woman, in her thirties maybe, slim, dark, grave, dressed in a kind of business suit. Rocky had no idea who she was.
Stan, though, seemed to recognize her. ‘About time you showed up,’ he said.
Rocky was baffled.
Martha’s face was bleak. ‘Rocky, this woman is called Roberta Golding. She is a Next. She says Stan is too. He’s a Next, or they think so. And she’s come here to take him away from me.’
15
I ALWAYS KNEW he was special,’ said Martha Berg. ‘I suppose every mother thinks that. Even as a toddler, when he started to talk, he would gabble away.’
Roberta Golding nodded gravely. ‘We call that quicktalk. All Next children do this naturally.’
They were sitting around a table in the small living room of Martha’s house: Martha, this Roberta Golding woman, Stan – and Rocky, to whom the Next were not much more than a legend, a kind of horror story of the past, of smart kids the government had tried to lock up, or charismatic super-geniuses who had hijacked a US Navy twain and killed everybody. But this woman hadn’t come for Rocky.
Stan was just smiling.
Martha went on, ‘As he grew he was always running ahead of what his teachers planned for him. Fortunately that’s not much of a problem here, because the schooling is so informal. Mostly Jez and I worked it out between us—’
‘Jez, your husband.’
‘He’s aloft just now. I mean, up
in the orbital anchor station of the tower. Takes days to get up and down, you know; even when work stops down here they’re stuck up there . . .’
Roberta said, ‘There’s no rush. We don’t have to make any decisions before you can speak to your husband.’
‘Well, we kept his schooling going until he was beyond the both of us, and off on his own. There are pretty good online resources here. We just let him loose on that.’
Roberta glanced at Stan. ‘I too grew up among humans, Stan. I know how frustrating it can be. How you have to keep yourself hidden.’
Martha said ruefully, ‘Oh, he didn’t do a lot of hiding.’
‘But if he had grown up among the Next,’ Roberta said softly, ‘he would have been learning with others like himself – and in our community, the Grange, we adults learn from the children in their discovery of the world.’ She eyed Stan. ‘There is a whole universe of ideas to explore. The legacy we inherited from humanity is only the beginning, for us.’
Rocky blurted now, ‘I hate the way you talk. We, you. Humanity, the Next. You look human enough to me. I’m sorry. I know it’s not my business.’
Martha touched his arm. ‘You’re his friend. Of course it’s your business.’
‘But, in fact, I am not human, as you are,’ Roberta said gently. ‘Genetically we diverge. The structure of my brain is different from yours.’ She smiled. ‘The neurologists at the US Navy base at Hawaii, where the most intensive study of Next children was performed before the establishment of the Grange, were able to determine that much.’
‘This Grange,’ Martha said nervously. ‘This is where you’re proposing to take Stan. Where is it?’
‘Far from here. Stepwise, I mean. We keep the location a secret. It was set up in the aftermath of an incident at a place called Happy Landings. A threat was made to destroy us. My kind. It could not have got us all, and the attempt was not made in the end; wiser heads prevailed. Nevertheless we heeded the warning. We have detached ourselves from the human world, for our safety, and yours.’
‘But you’re here now,’ Rocky said. ‘Acting undercover. Right? Pretending you’re something you’re not. Like the Arbiters.’ Who, Roberta had revealed, were Next agents too.
‘I can’t deny that. But we are here to study you, as well as help you. You are, after all, our precursors. And there has been no proper study of mankind.’
Martha said, a touch bitterly, ‘You mean no study aside from what we did ourselves. Which doesn’t count.’
‘That is so. And we do try to help you, in various ways.’
Rocky found that disturbing. He was only sixteen; he knew he was ignorant, naive. But he wondered just how much influence a covert organization of super-intelligent post-humans might be having, working across the worlds of mankind.
‘And,’ Roberta said, ‘we are looking for more of our own. Like you, Stan. Happy Landings was something of a forcing ground for the genetic development which led to our emergence: a peculiar community of humans and trolls thrown together, a product of the strange nature of the Long Earth. That was what created us. But now that genetic upgrading has spread through the rest of the population, and here and there, now and then, one of us will emerge among you.’
‘Us and you, again,’ Rocky said bitterly. ‘Stan’s a poppy growing in a weed patch, right?’
‘Not at all,’ she said blandly.
Martha said, ‘And you’re offering Stan a place with you in this – Grange?’
‘We’re offering him the chance to come visit us. See if he thinks he will be happy there.’
‘Suppose he isn’t,’ Rocky said. ‘Suppose he wants to come home. Will you let him?’
‘Of course. It’s not a prison, or—’
‘But he’ll know where you are. You said they already tried to blow you up once.’
Roberta said gently, ‘Stan could not expose us without exposing himself. He’s far too intelligent to do any such thing. Isn’t that true, Stan?’
Stan hadn’t spoken since first being introduced to Roberta. ‘Talking to you is interesting. Like a chess game, almost. We can both see our way to the end game.’
She nodded, smiling. ‘That is an acute perception. In a way it is as if we have less free will than these others. Because we can think our way through a given situation, discarding inappropriate alternatives.’
‘These others,’ Rocky said. ‘You keep saying it.’
‘But,’ Roberta said to Stan, ‘we do debate higher issues. Goals. Motivations. That’s where our differences are expressed. At the level of strategy, not tactics.’
Stan nodded. ‘And what is your strategy? What are your motivations? What do you intend for humanity?’
Martha said hotly, ‘Isn’t that up to us?’
‘No, Mom,’ Stan said evenly. ‘Not with people like this in the world. You’re no more in control of your own destiny than an elephant on a game reserve. That’s a good analogy, isn’t it?’ he said, challenging Roberta. ‘With you as the wardens.’
‘It’s not like that. At least, not all of us think that way. Certainly we want mankind to be . . . happy.’
‘Happy? Wandering around without purpose, in a kind of garden, perfected by you. A Long Utopia. Is that your goal?’
‘We don’t have a goal,’ Roberta said. ‘At least, not an agreed one. We are developing our capabilities, exploring our own motivations. The debate on objectives continues. I invite you to join that debate. If you care about humanity as much as you seem to—’
‘I need to think.’ Stan stood, abruptly. ‘Excuse me.’ He stepped away.
When he’d gone, the room seemed empty.
Martha poured more iced tea. She said, ‘He’ll go with you. I don’t have to be a super-brain to know that much. I know my son. He’ll go, if only out of curiosity. But he’ll come home again.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Roberta. ‘But I think you should be prepared to lose him. I’m very sorry.’
Martha looked away, evidently unable to speak.
16
NELSON AZIKIWE HAD said, when offering to research Joshua’s family, ‘One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’ Maybe, but it turned out to be a mighty stubborn thread.
It took months that stretched, surprisingly, to years – four years after the promise he’d made on Joshua’s fiftieth birthday – before Nelson was able to make much progress with his search. His breakthrough came not through such networks as his online buddies the Quizmasters, but through his acquaintance with Lobsang – in fact, through an old friend of Sister Agnes, who heard through shared friends, she said, that Nelson was looking for information about ‘London’s scandalous past’.
For, to Nelson’s surprise, his investigations had led him to that battered city.
Nelson met Miss Guinevere Perch in a Long Earth footprint of London. A couple of steps from the frozen Datum ruin, this new community was a tangle of hastily erected refugee camps cut into oak forest. A contemporary of Agnes, Miss Perch was in her nineties now, withered, birdlike, her hair a tangle, but with a beaming smile for visitors. She lived alone, though with daily assistance, in a house built in a fairly crude Low Earth colonial style. But she dressed richly, and in a room filled with exotic furniture a peripatetic butler served Nelson tea and cake.
Miss Perch gleefully showed Nelson images of the properties she had once owned on the Datum, including a very expensive Georgian terrace house in central London. ‘Handy for the House of Commons,’ she said. And when she showed him glimpses of the exotic equipment she had kept in the basement of that terrace house, and outlined the activities that went on down there for the benefit of MPs and other parliamentarians – and a visitors’ book, complete with covert photographic portraits, that spanned decades – he understood why she had got in touch with him. When it came to what was left of the British Establishment, even now, sixteen years after Yellowstone, Miss Guinevere Perch knew where the bodies were buried.
And with that power, she was able to h
elp Nelson uncover some very private secrets indeed.
But as it turned out, when Nelson did begin to tug systematically on the thread of Joshua Valienté’s origins, the story he unravelled went much deeper than the biography of Joshua’s own father. It turned out to be a history, in fact, more than two centuries old . . .
From the stage door of the Victoria theatre and down Lambeth’s crowded New Cut, the Great Elusivo – a.k.a. Luis Ramon Valienté, a.k.a. the Hon. Reginald Blythe, and a.k.a. a variety of other pseudonyms depending on circumstances – followed his mysterious interrogator, Oswald Hackett, towards the promised oyster-house.
The pavements of the New Cut, banks of a river of horse-drawn traffic, swarmed with people and their multifarious business. Of course they did at this time of a Saturday evening, in March of the year 1848, when the Surrey-side theatres opened their doors to let out the posh folk from the boxes, and the young costermongers swarmed out of the threepenny stalls. The shops were all open, the keepers in their doorways, the windows full of furniture or tools or second-hand clothes, or heaps of vegetables or cheese or eggs. But there was as much business being done from the stalls that crowded the street itself. The repetitive cries of the stall vendors or their boys rose up over the clatter of horses’ hooves: ‘Chestnuts, penny a scoop!’ and ‘Pies all ’ot!’ and ‘Yarmouth herrings three a penny!’ Many of these voices were Irish; the destitute folk of that country had come to the city fleeing the famine, and were looked down on even by the poorest of the indigenous folk. More elaborate sermons came from the cheap Johns selling Sheffield-steel cutlery in their thick Yorkshire accents, and the patterers talking up their gaudy literature of gruesome crimes. Luis had to sidestep an old woman seated on a low stool, smoking a pipe, selling framed engravings of Queen Victoria, her Consort and her children from an upturned umbrella. The street entertainers were everywhere too, the ballad singers and the sword swallowers and fire eaters, an old blind woman playing a hurdy-gurdy, and one man with a tabletop display of mechanical figures from Austria, a princess dancing the polka, a trumpeting elephant, which held the attention of rapt street children . . .
The Long Utopia Page 10