The Long Utopia

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘And have been for years – since my wife and I first arrived here. The physics is trivial. The flyby rocks come in, they are dragged by the Earth’s new magnetic field, and, thus coupled, they pull at the Earth. Each rock speeds up the planet’s spin, just by a fraction. Then, when they reach their lowest orbit, they start to push against the planet’s magnetic field to spiral back out of there again – and, again, they give the planet another minute shove. Theoretically, it’s as if the Earth has been made the armature of a huge electric motor.’ He looked at their faces, seeking understanding.

  Jha said, ‘I think I get it. Metaphorically anyhow. I have a daughter. When she was little, in the park in our home town back on West 5, there was a roundabout, a simple thing, a wooden disc with hand rails spinning on a pivot. The kids liked to run by it; each one grabbed a rail and let it go, and with every tug the roundabout spun a little faster.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  Bowring sucked his teeth. ‘So the world’s spinning faster. What about the conservation of momentum? Where’s the extra spin coming from?’

  ‘I don’t have the facilities to observe properly,’ Abrahams said. ‘Perhaps you do. It appears that the flyby objects stream off towards the sun. There they are probably deflected at closest approach by a gravitational assist – or maybe they use solar sails – and that way they harvest angular momentum from the sun, and return for another pass. It’s a slow process for an individual rock; it must take months or years to make a full orbit, from Earth to sun and back again. But with a stream of such rocks the accelerating effect becomes continuous.’

  ‘So let’s see if I’ve got this straight,’ Jha said. ‘The latitude bands, the magnetic field they create, are ways of coupling these flyby rocks to the Earth. But what’s really happening is that through the rock stream some of the sun’s spin is being transferred to the Earth.’

  ‘The sun’s angular momentum, yes. And its angular kinetic energy.’

  ‘Yeah. A hell of a lot of energy,’ Bowring said dubiously.

  Abrahams smiled wistfully. ‘That depends on your perspective. Suppose you doubled this Earth’s spin rate – brought the day down to twelve hours. You’d need four times its original angular energy. But to top up the spin to that rate would take just thirty minutes of the sun’s total fusion-energy output. It’s a lot to us, but if you can tap a source as vast as the sun . . .’

  Bowring said grimly, ‘Well, the damage is being done. Dr Abrahams, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of effects the spin-up is having on this world as a whole. Every Earth is essentially a ball of liquid: the iron core and the mantle. The solid crust is only a fine rind laid over that liquid interior. Under the continents the crust is maybe sixty miles thick, compared with the Earth’s radius of four thousand miles. It’s as if the Earth is a big round crème brûlée.

  ‘Because of its spin – I mean its regular, standard-issue twenty-four-hour spin – every Earth is deformed, flattened slightly, not quite a sphere, bulging at the equator. Normally this isn’t a problem. And the natural state of things is actually for the spin to be changing anyhow, slowing very gradually over geological time. The solid crust has the chance to adjust to the changes of deformation.

  ‘That’s not the case here. In the few years since the spin-up has begun, the crust’s deformation, at the equator at least, has increased by around eight miles. That might not sound much, but the ocean-floor crust is only about three miles thick. And so—’

  Abrahams traced the jagged lines that spanned and circled the oceans on the basketball globe. ‘Fractures in the sea bed.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. There are natural faults where the sea floor is spreading, such as down the spine of the Atlantic, and where the oceanic tectonic plates butt up against the continents, such as around the coasts of the Pacific. Now these faults are cracking, opening up, and you get quakes and volcanism. If they’re underwater, you can get tremendous tsunamis that batter the coastal areas—’

  ‘The smell of sulphur in the air.’ Abrahams smiled sadly. ‘The aroma of Yellowstone. Wonderful sunsets. Symptoms of a world coming apart at the seams. And bad news for anybody like me, who only came here looking for a spot of quiet farming.’

  Bowring looked impatient, uncomfortable. ‘I must keep stressing that this is still largely guesswork. Extrapolation. We have so little data . . . This is not the Datum, which is, or anyhow was before Yellowstone, saturated by survey gear of all kinds. Networks of seismometers, for instance. I myself worked at the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana, an exquisite instrument. And of course the climate was monitored by ships, planes, satellites, as well as weather stations with a global coverage. Here we have only our one observation platform in the Cowley, a few pinprick settlements like yours, Dr Abrahams – forgive me – and a handful of observations from the instruments we can emplace. We need gravimeters to measure the planetary morphological distortion, line-of-sight lasers to measure the distortion directly.’

  Jha said, ‘I know you’re doing your best, Ken. As we all are.’

  Bowring grunted, visibly unhappy. ‘At least we can do something. I myself was trained up properly, before Yellowstone. But the Datum science institutions have never recovered from the volcano. The next generation of scientists will be amateurs, if that. Then we’d have no hope of understanding something like this at all.’

  ‘So,’ said Abrahams, ‘we’ve talked about the what. Have you got any closer to understanding why this is happening?’

  ‘Well, we’re asking the question, at least. Come see . . .’

  The silver beetle was, self-evidently, dead.

  It lay on its back on a table, the gas pods removed from its green underbelly, its sections of silvery armour carefully detached and laid aside, its carapace of what looked like black ceramic sliced through and peeled back to expose a greenish, pulpy mass within.

  ‘I have to emphasize we didn’t kill this thing,’ Bowring said. ‘We found this corpse—’

  ‘Or this inert unit,’ Jha corrected him. ‘There’s no consensus yet over whether these creatures are alive or not.’

  ‘Very well. We found him in the big exhausted mine working you call the Gallery. Evidently inactive. We’ve no idea what happened to him, or even how long he’s been there; we’ve no idea how processes of decay work with these creatures.’

  ‘Or even if he’s a he,’ Jha said dryly.

  ‘True enough. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. Especially when you see one standing upright, with that eerie mask-like face turned to you.’

  ‘You settlers call them “beetles”,’ Jha said to Abrahams. ‘I’ve heard the scientists call them “assemblers”. The marines under our Colonel Wang are calling them “bugs”.’

  ‘But we don’t know what they call themselves because they won’t talk to us,’ Bowring said, sounding exasperated. ‘We believe they are capable of communication, Dr Abrahams. Well, that must be true for them to be able to accomplish such complex feats of engineering as the viaducts. We believe they are individuals; they exhibit individualistic behaviour – such as the first ones discovered by the children here, who began trading rock samples for bits of beetle jewellery. You could regard that as a kind of preliminary communication, if you like. Pre-symbolic. You could even see it as a kind of play.’

  ‘Play?’ Abrahams mused. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Play, yes. Their assaying of this world has evidently been very extensive, and it’s hard to imagine a few random ore samples given them by uneducated kids can be of any real value. It’s a chink of hope we might somehow get through to them. And that they’re not evil. Not if they can be playful.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Even the conquistadors loved their children, Dr Bowring. Even the Nazis, probably.’

  ‘True enough. Anyhow that’s as far as we’ve got. We have one of the SETI crowd here who’s been trying to get them to recognize prime numbers in symbols, heaps of stones. You know the kind of thing: mathematics is supp
osedly the universal language. The beetles just walk away.’

  Abrahams laughed. ‘I’d walk away if you started counting out prime numbers to me. How boring . . .’

  Jha leaned over the beetle on its table, a facemask over her mouth. The dissection had progressed a lot since Jha had last seen the specimen, but in the body’s interior she made out nothing but a kind of spongy mass, undifferentiated. ‘I’m just a lowly plant biologist, but even I can see we’re lacking in internal structure here. No obvious organs, no skeleton.’

  Bowring shrugged. ‘We think the ceramic shell acts as a kind of exoskeleton, to support the weight. And there is a lot of weight; that spongy stuff is very high density. We’ve run various scans – MRI, sonar. There is structure in there, but it’s a kind of network with identifiable nodes, not a collection of organs like the human. The same kind of structure extends to the head, which seems to be more a sensor pod than a brain pan.’ He glanced at Abrahams. ‘Which could be significant. The human skull has grown over our evolutionary history, but even so there’s only so much room in there – and cerebral functionality has to share space with extensive areas devoted to sight processing, for instance.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Whereas if these creatures have their brains in their stomachs, so to speak—’

  ‘Room to grow. And if they are potentially very smart, they’re also very capable. Take a look at this.’ Bowring picked up a tablet, which showed an image of a bug’s manipulator arm. He swiped the image to magnify a section.

  Jha saw that the ‘limbs’ terminated with splits, into twig-like appendages like fingers. But the ‘fingers’ bifurcated too, into still finer manipulators.

  ‘It goes on down to the nano scale,’ Bowring said. ‘We think these creatures could manipulate molecules.’

  Abrahams said, ‘You call it a “creature”. We return to the point. Is it a creature, though? Is it biological?’

  ‘As Commander Jha said, opinion is divided on that. Animal or robot? My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that this is some kind of very advanced cyborg. And a very old design, to the point where the technology and the biology have merged, seamlessly. The manipulator substructures certainly look engineered. On the other hand the basic body plan looks like a throwback to some biological origin, to me. I mean, it’s not efficient. Why not have the whole body as a kind of modular robot? That way you could split off substructures, merge whole bodies to form larger structures . . . Certainly the capability to engineer on a molecular scale and upward gives them enormous manipulative power. Dr Abrahams, I think a beetle could make anything from almost any ingredient, given the right elemental composition.’

  ‘Including a copy of itself?’

  ‘Yes. We know these things have – reproduced.’

  ‘Using locally sourced materials – beetles grown from the substance of this world. I found that out myself. This is a von Neumann replicator, then. A machine capable of reproducing.’

  ‘Among other capabilities, yes. And when they combine they are clearly capable of tremendous feats, like their globe-spanning viaducts.’

  ‘But these creatures don’t come from Earth at all,’ Abrahams said. ‘I mean, from any of the worlds of the Long Earth.’

  ‘Right,’ Bowring said grimly. ‘And of course our best evidence for an extraterrestrial origin—’

  ‘Is the Planetarium.’

  And to get there, to travel from the mundanity of New Springfield into the utterly unknown, the highly trained and heavily armed crew of a Navy twain had to submit to being stepped over hand in hand by local children, just as had Lobsang and Agnes from the beginning. Children who had figured out how to do this by themselves years ago.

  40

  MARGARITA JHA HAD stood beneath this alien sky several times since the twain’s arrival here at New Springfield. She’d never got used to it, and never expected to. The party of marines and scientists who were working here in the Planetarium, at a small base camp of tents and trestle tables – and a gun emplacement – were a welcome dose of the mundane. There was even a place for the local kids, the vital stepping link, with food and drink and books to read, even toys.

  Once the party had stepped through, Colonel Jennifer Wang, who was in charge here, approached Jha with a brisk nod. Wang, the commander of the Cowley’s small marine detachment, wore body armour and a facemask, though nobody had any proof that the latter was necessary; the Planetarium air was benign. ‘Commander Jha.’

  ‘All seems quiet.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, just another routine day here at Bug Central. Bugs doing their bug stuff and leaving us alone. Step easy, Commander.’

  ‘Thank you, Colonel.’ As routine an exchange as they’d ever had, Jha thought. She’d known Wang for a long time, in fact, since they’d shipped together as junior officers on the Benjamin Franklin under Maggie Kauffman many years ago.

  And yet – look where they were! You couldn’t escape the thought: what if the gossamer bridge they had just crossed to get here vanished as suddenly as, presumably, it had appeared? But here were these marines in this extraordinary place, and the young scientists from the Cowley doing their jobs, joshing and complaining about the food as if they were in some training camp in a Low Earth Iowa. Of course the local kids weren’t troubled at all. Jha suppressed her own gloomy speculations. What else could you do?

  She went to rejoin Abrahams and Bowring, who were peering up at the crowded sky.

  Bowring said, ‘It’s clear this world doesn’t belong. Not in this chain of worlds, our Long Earth. We’re a little light on mathematicians in this expedition,’ he said ruefully. ‘Damn brain-boxes tend not to travel well. But those we do have are suggesting we’re seeing some kind of flaw in the Long Earth. I mean, its structure in higher dimensions.’

  ‘It has to be something like that,’ Abrahams said.

  ‘I’m afraid we have no kind of handle on that yet, on how this could happen – or how to fix it. We’re going to need somebody a lot smarter than us to figure that out.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Abrahams said dryly. ‘But there’s no evidence that the beetles can step, is there? I mean, aside from the unique step that takes them from Gallery to Planetarium.’

  ‘None at all,’ said Jha severely. ‘But we’re keeping an eye on that. The Captain’s posted sentries in neighbouring worlds, stepwise. It seems that a handful of these bugs leaked into New Springfield from – someplace else. Well, from this place, wherever this is. The point is, now they’re using the resources of New Springfield’s Earth to breed like rats in a granary. We do not want these bugs to step over into another Long Earth world and start all over again. And, worse yet, spreading even further.’

  ‘A wise precaution.’

  Bowring said, ‘But we are making some progress with our observations.’ He pointed at the sky, the crowding discs of the stars. Many of them were too bright to look at directly, like fine needles in the eye if you stared. ‘Evidently this is a world inside a globular cluster, a dense cloud of stars. The density tails off if you look through the crowd and further out. Clusters are big balls of stars, quite compact, and most of them orbit the centre of the Galaxy, each travelling as one big mass.’

  ‘But which cluster?’ Jha asked. ‘Have you made any progress with that?’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ he said with a grin. ‘Clusters differ in their age, their metallicity, their size, and we can measure such parameters. We think this is a globular cluster called M15 in our catalogues. Thirty thousand light years from Earth – well, that’s about as far away as the centre of the Galaxy. Very old but pretty big, a hundred thousand stars crammed into a space less than a couple of hundred light years across. The astronomers we have on board are pretty excited, actually. There’s believed to be a big black hole lurking at the centre of this cluster – a mash-up of dead old stars, I guess. They’re thrilled to be up close and personal with such a thing.’

  ‘But black holes aren’t what we’re here to study,’ Jha said reprovingly. �
�We’re primarily studying the assemblers. Whatever they seem to be doing on this world.’

  ‘“Doing on this world”,’ Abrahams repeated. ‘They’re clearly not native to Earth. You don’t think they’re native here either?’

  Bowring shrugged. ‘Hard to be definitive, we’ve so little evidence. But, those bubbles you see?’ He gestured around the landscape. ‘Sacs of air everywhere. They look biological, like flotation sacs on seaweed – much larger of course—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The gaseous contents of the sacs match the contents of the bags you see attached to individual beetles. And they all contain a subtly different suite of gases from the local atmosphere – which itself isn’t far from Earthlike, which is why it’s breathable for us. In the sacs there’s more carbon dioxide, more sulphur compounds and so on. Rather like a dilute industrial smog, from the peak days of the Datum.’

  ‘Terraforming,’ Jha said. Suddenly she saw it. ‘You think the bugs are manufacturing a different atmosphere. They aren’t native to this world. They’re terraforming it.’

  Bowring pursed his lips. ‘Well, that’s the wrong word. Not making it like the Earth, as we would . . . Delivering conditions that suit them, presumably. Xenoforming – perhaps that’s a better term. They came to this world to make it like their own.’ He looked around, pulling a face. ‘Look at them swarming everywhere. They take the stuff of this world, and are making it into copies of themselves. How disgusting – what greed.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Abrahams said. ‘But we aren’t so holy. The European explorers imported their own farm animals, their vermin, even their song birds to the Americas, to Australasia. What have the Europeans done save convert a significant fraction of those continents’ biomass into hundreds of millions of copies of themselves? Just like the beetles. If by a rather low-tech method.’

  ‘They are disturbingly like us, then,’ Bowring said.

  Jha asked, ‘So if they aren’t from this world, then where?’