‘Well, I can only speculate.’
Jha sighed. ‘I have a feeling we don’t have time to get everything peer-reviewed, Dr Bowring. Speculate away.’
‘I think they crossed space, to this world. As opposed to stepping here. They are interstellar travellers. Look up there.’ He pointed to his left, at the sky. ‘It may or may not be visible to your eyes – it isn’t to mine, but the youngsters can see it, and the spectrometers show it clearly. The stars in that direction, many of them, have a greenish tinge.’
‘Dyson spheres,’ Abrahams said immediately. ‘Or some kind of clouds, at least. Another of Freeman Dyson’s big ideas: stars surrounded by life-filled artefacts. Silver beetles, spreading across the stars.’
‘Yes. They are expansionist. Colonizers, as humans have always been. That’s what we see up there, visible in the very sky, a grand, expanding wave of them, coming from somewhere in that direction, to your left, which is to the periphery of the cluster. I suppose it’s possible they didn’t originate in this cluster at all. But they are certainly spreading through it.
‘This particular world, the local star, must be somewhere close to the wavefront. Because in that direction,’ he pointed to his right, ‘we see no green stars.’
‘OK,’ Abrahams said. ‘But they didn’t cross space to get to New Springfield.’
‘No. They stepped there, as we did. I suspect they just stumbled through some kind of warped stepping process into the Gallery, and found themselves on that particular Earth – and they’re treating it quite differently. With the big spin-up, rather than a replacement of the air and what-not, as they’re doing here.’
‘Why the difference?’
‘I do have some ideas about that.’ Bowring pointed directly above his head. ‘Up there, at the edge of the colonization wavefront, we see something else, orbiting the stars. Neither the usual cosmic furniture, the planets and the asteroids of a virgin system, nor the green that characterizes the beetles’ colonization push. We see another kind of cloud, orbiting some of those stars. Big chunks, irregularly shaped.’
Abrahams whistled.
‘Purposeful destruction?’ Jha asked, wondering.
‘If I were not a respectable scientist I would be prepared to speculate that there, at least, somebody is fighting back, against the beetles’ expansion. And that may be why we find so much activity by the beetles, just now, in the New Springfield Earth. It’s no coincidence. It’s because they encountered us. They have learned to anticipate resistance. And so they accelerated whatever programme of work they had, in order to get it done before we have a chance to fight back, to stop them.
‘As to what that programme is, as I said, at New Springfield they seem to have adopted a different strategy. They aren’t xenoforming that world. But what?’
‘I think I know,’ Abrahams said. ‘Dyson didn’t conceive of his spin motor as an end in itself. He was thinking of how to build his great spheres, artefacts that could enclose a whole star.’
‘Ah,’ said Bowring. ‘And the only way you can get enough matter to do that—’
‘Is to dismantle a planet.’
‘Dismantle.’ That mundane word shocked Jha. ‘How could you do that? . . . Oh.’
Abrahams said grimly, ‘By spinning it up, faster and faster, until—’
‘Yes.’ Jha took a breath. ‘I need to talk to the Captain.’
Abrahams said, ‘And I need to talk to my wife.’
41
PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley.
‘. . . Is this thing on, Jocasta? What do you mean, your name’s not Jocasta? Young lady, I am seventy-eight years old, my childhood home is under ten metres of ice, and I haven’t got time for your nonsense. Eh? What green light? Ah . . .
‘Von Neumann replicators, then. Like a super matter printer – a printer that could produce another matter printer. A machine that can make a copy of itself. Much like yourself, Jocasta! What could we do with such a technology?
‘How about colonizing the Galaxy?
‘In the last century, in a more innocent age of happy memory, the physicist Frank Tipler proposed a way we humans could colonize the stars, and cheaply into the bargain. Tipler’s scheme assumed nothing much beyond the slower-than-light transport methods we can easily envisage today. Just as in our exploration of the solar system, we would begin with unmanned probes. The first wave would be slow, no faster than we could afford.
‘But the probes would be self-replicating, you see: capable of constructing anything, given raw materials, including copies of themselves. And that’s the clever bit. Earlier the great physicist John von Neumann had shown that such machines are theoretically possible – and, after all, human beings are capable of replication with very little training . . . Have I made that joke already, Jocasta? Oh, very well. I’m seventy-eight, you know.
‘Now, when such a probe arrived at its target, it would settle down, look around a bit, perhaps grow a few human colonists from some seed bank – you know the kind of thing – and then, crucially, start to build copies of itself, a new generation of probes that will move on, further and deeper into the Galaxy, in search of homes of their own.
‘We can expect the migration to continue, in all directions outward from the Earth, pretty relentlessly once it has started. And the process would be self-financing, and that would have been music to the ears of every money-grubbing university administrator with whom it has been my misfortune to lock horns. That’s because the new colonies would be built from local resources, requiring nothing of Earth. We must invest merely in the cost of the initial generation of probes.
‘But there’s a trap.
‘Suppose we start colonizing the stars, after the manner of Tipler. Earth is suddenly the centre of a growing sphere of colonization – a sphere whose volume has to keep increasing, if a constant growth rate is to be achieved. The leading edge, the colonizing wave, has to sweep on faster and faster, eating up worlds and stars and moving on to the next, because of the pressure from behind . . .
‘Imagine then a Tipler wave of replicating robots swarming across the Galaxy, turning fallow star systems into copies of themselves, working feverishly just to keep up with the pace of expansion. Even if such a probe arrived in an inhabited system it must immediately crush any native life, transforming all in its path into more copies of itself. It would have no choice; it would have no time to do otherwise, to maintain the momentum of the expansion.
‘Is this infeasible, technologically? Not at all. We could almost build such things.
‘Would it be unethical to unleash such a compound-interest horror on the rest of the universe? Most people would think so, but don’t ask a banker.
‘Is this what the colonists on that godforsaken High Meggers world seem to have discovered in their hole in the ground? A Tipler wavefront? Sounds like it, doesn’t it? . . .
‘What’s that, Jocasta? What should be done about New Springfield? Well, I should build a very, very high wall around these fellows, metaphorically speaking.
‘Now then, is that enough? I am seventy-eight years old, you know . . .’
42
AGNES WAS SUSPICIOUS as soon as Lobsang said he had a plan. ‘A plan? A plan to do what? Lobsang, you already blew our cover, all but, by standing up in front of those Navy officers and taking over the meeting.’
‘I don’t think it matters. The universe isn’t giving me any choice, Agnes.’
‘Oh, don’t get pompous. Do you imagine the universe cares about you? Look, Lobsang, think about it—’
‘What is there to think about? Who are these beetles, these bugs, to fall on a world and consume it for their own purposes – everything it was, everything it could have been, gone in a flash, just to fuel another
minute stage of their own endless expansion?’
‘Hm. I’d say you have a point if it wasn’t for the fact that that’s what humanity has always done, as you’ve lectured me about many times.’
‘That’s true. But now we’re in the path of the juggernaut. And there are evidently people, minds of some sort, fighting back in the Planetarium sky. Are they not right to resist? Should we not at least try as well?’
Agnes shook her head. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t see why it has to be you. And besides, how can we fight back against creatures who can modify whole worlds?’
‘An inferior technology might be able to strike a blow against a superior, given boldness and the advantage of surprise. Consider Captain Cook,’ he said. ‘The Hawaiians killed him, when he landed on their islands.’
‘Much good it did the Hawaiians in the long run.’
‘Agnes, I don’t think I can save this world. But perhaps I can stop the beetles spreading further, from threatening more of the worlds of mankind. But I’ll need help.’
‘You’ve already sent Sally and Joshua on some kind of mission, I know that.’ Not that Agnes was sure what that quest was about.
‘Yes. But even if they succeed in their quest I don’t think it’s going to be enough.’
‘Then what? Who else do you want?’
He said simply, ‘The Next.’
43
AS FOR JOSHUA and Sally:
Hand in hand, they emerged from their fall through the latest soft place, the latest flaw in the great tangled structure that was the Long Earth. Joshua found himself standing on red, gritty earth, by the shore of a body of water, a turbid grey sea, or lake maybe. Standing: in fact he immediately crumpled over, all the energy sucked out of him. And he was suffused by a cold deep in the core of his body, as if he was suffering from hypothermia, even though the air here was warm, if dry, salty. Squatting on his haunches he wrapped his arms around his body and tried to still the shivering by main force.
This was the after-effect of passing through soft places. Joshua, having travelled on and off with Sally for many years by now, knew that she had grown up with a knowledge of the soft places, and a basically subconscious ability to detect and use them. His own best mental image was that the Long Earth was like a necklace of worlds, spread out in some higher order of reality, along which he could step one by one, in one direction or another, which had arbitrarily been labelled ‘West’ and ‘East’. But, it seemed, that necklace wasn’t a simple string but looped back over itself, intersecting itself in knots and cuts. So, if you could locate it correctly, a soft place could take you on a seven-league-boot step across a far stepwise distance in the Long Earth, and if you worked it right a long way geographically too. Damn useful if you knew how to use them. Damn interesting for the theoreticians too. And damn tough for any but the very best steppers.
He’d get over this; he’d been through it before. But the older you got, the harder it felt. And every damn time, these days, the stump of his left arm, under the prosthetic hand, ached like hell.
Sally, meanwhile, was already at work. She had dumped her pack on the ground, pulled out a kind of trenching tool, and started to dig a hole. She had always been tougher than Joshua physically, and even though he had been a poster boy for stepping for forty years, with her mastery of the soft places Sally had always been far more at home in the Long Earth than he was. But he could see that their journey had affected even her too, and she moved stiffly as she dug.
He asked, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Checking we’re not on an island.’
‘An island? I thought we came looking for Lobsang, not for islands.’
‘We are. You can make yourself useful, if you like. Go take a look at what’s over that ridge.’
‘What ridge?’
She ignored the question.
When he felt able he stood up, dropped his own pack beside Sally’s, and looked around. This shallow beach did indeed lead up to a ridge, maybe a remnant of eroded, wind-sculpted dunes.
He walked that way.
The sand under his feet was fine, almost dusty, and very dry. But it let his boots sink in with every pace, using up even more of his energy. They seemed to be well above the high water mark at least, hence the dry sand. But there was no sign of life on this beach, he noticed, no worm casts, seaweed, shells, no wading birds, no crabs working the water that pooled nearer the edge of the sea. No driftwood either, and he wondered how they were going to build a fire.
The sun was high in a milky, washed-out sky. The only sounds were the soft lap of the waves, and the scrape of Sally’s trenching tool. A lifeless world.
His legs were aching and he was panting by the time he reached the summit of the ridge. Up here he found himself looking over an almost flat, red-brown landscape, the horizontal broken by tired-looking remnants of hills on the horizon. The only colours were the pale grey-green of what looked like lichen on the rocks, and a purplish smear on the crust of a mud pool a little further inland. There wasn’t a scrap of vegetation anywhere – though he did see the grey-blue of a stream, or river, maybe half a mile away, running down to its own rendezvous with the sea. So there was fresh water to be had, at least.
In his time he’d travelled far across the Long Earth, but he’d rarely seen a less promising landscape. However, the air was free of mist, and he could see dry land all the way to the horizon in every direction. He was not on an island, unless it was a pretty gigantic one.
He returned to Sally and reported in.
‘Good,’ she said. She sat back, scraped sand from her bare arms, and swigged water from a plastic bottle. She’d dug a respectable arm’s length into the dirt. ‘And I think I dug far enough down to prove there’s no carapace lurking down there. At least the work warmed me up.’
Carapace? ‘Why are you so concerned we’re not on an island?’ After all these years Joshua still got annoyed when she was being cryptic. ‘Where are we, Sally?’
She closed her eyes. ‘I memorized the precise number. Earth West 174,827,918.’
‘Shit. A hundred and seventy-five million?’
‘That’s according to the catalogue compiled by the Armstrong II, the Navy airship that came this way more than a decade ago. Believe the number or not. Some people think the Long Earth gets – chaotic – over large enough scales, and simple numbering doesn’t work any more. Hardly matters if it does, does it? As long as you know where you’re going.’
‘As you do, evidently. But even so, Sally, I never came remotely so far before.’
‘I know.’
‘Which is why I feel so beat up?’
‘You got it.’
‘And you think we’ll find Lobsang here?’ Meaning the ambulant unit that they had left behind on Earth West 2,000,000 plus, twenty-eight years ago, as it had departed with an entity that had called itself First Person Singular.
‘I know we will,’ she said with her usual strained patience. ‘Which is why I brought you here.’
‘Fine. So what now? I guess I could go fetch some fresh water. There’s a stream just over thataway.’
‘You do that.’
‘I don’t see any wood for a fire.’
‘The nights aren’t cold. Also there are no roaming critters to be kept away. Not on the continental land anyhow. A lean-to and our survival blankets will be enough.’
‘I guess there’s no hunting to be done. No fish to be fished from that ocean.’
She shrugged. ‘We can survive on our rations for a few days, Joshua. We could process bacterial slime if we had to. But we won’t be here long – just as long as it takes to find Lobsang – or for him to find us.’
‘And how do we go about that?’
‘It’s all in hand, Joshua.’ She reached into her pack and pulled out a small radio transmitter set. ‘Short-wave radio. Our signals will bounce around the planet. Lobsang will hear. Go fill up the water bottles. I’ll let you set up the antenna if you like, it’s a fold-
up kit. I know how you boys like your gadgets . . .’
But Joshua had stopped listening.
The sea was no longer featureless. Suddenly, it seemed, there was an island, not far off shore, a shield of green and yellow on the breast of the grey water. He pointed. ‘How did I miss that?’
Sally murmured, ‘Don’t beat yourself up. It wasn’t there before.’
Belatedly Joshua thought to rummage in his pack for his binoculars.
On the island, through the glasses, he saw a suite of life quite unlike anything that characterized the mainland as far as he’d seen. Beyond a fringe of what looked like beach, there were forest clumps, and animals moving – what looked like horses, but small, almost dog-sized. Even the seawater by the shore was mildly turbulent, evidently full of life.
And this ‘island’ had a wake.
Sally was watching him. ‘You understand what you’re seeing?’
‘Sure.’ He grinned; he couldn’t help it. ‘It’s just as Nelson Azikiwe described. He said Lobsang took him to see a creature like this, off the coast of New Zealand but a lot closer to home, something like seven hundred thousand worlds out.’
‘Lobsang called that one Second Person Singular. It was actually a lot more typical of its class of creatures than the one we encountered, the one who called herself First Person Singular. The one that liked you.’
Only because Joshua, somehow, with his odd, almost troll-like sensitivity to the presence of other minds, had been able to sense her thoughts, even across the great span of the Long Earth. Thoughts that to him had been like the clanging of some great gong, echoing from beyond the horizon: thoughts full of bafflement and loneliness. And she, in turn, it seemed, had sensed his presence too.
‘First Person Singular wasn’t normal,’ Sally said. ‘She was the one gone wrong. Hence the mutual attraction between you, no doubt. Lobsang called the class of these beasts Traversers.’
‘And this is why we came here . . . Sally. Something’s happening.’
All around the living island the water was bubbling, growing more turbulent. Joshua saw that its profile was diminishing, almost as if the island was collapsing on itself, and the trees that sprouted from the rocks and earth that had collected on the back of this mobile creature shook and shuddered.
The Long Utopia Page 27