‘You say he’s a problem.’ Rocky glared at Roberta. ‘Stan. For you maybe, for LETC. He’s no problem for me.’
‘But he is your problem, Rocky,’ Roberta said gently. ‘I know it. I’ve seen you with him, remember. You’re the same age. You’ve known him since childhood. You came all the way to the Grange with him, and back. And you’ve stuck with him, while this – circus – has blown up around him and his teachings, and his other old friends have faded away. That’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Only his mother, and me. Even his father won’t see him any more.’
‘For you it’s personal. And that’s why you’re here, why we need your help. You want to protect him – I can see that – from these acolytes who are attracted to him, who want to use him for their own purposes.’
Sally snorted. ‘Just as you want to use him, for your purposes.’
Roberta showed no irritation. ‘What we want above all is for Stan to find his true destiny. That’s the best way we can help him. And that is not by letting him rabble-rouse the workers here. The authorities are growing concerned about the situation here, Rocky. I mean the government, state and federal. Homelands Security. Also the police. Here you have an agitator threatening the stability of the industrial operation, and the security of the high-energy, high-risk facility at the centre of it – not to mention jeopardizing the tax revenues to be garnered from it, now and in the future. If LETC has him shipped out of here they’ll find a sympathetic ear in government.’
Sally said, ‘“A sympathetic ear.” What the hell does that mean? All the kid’s doing is talking. What happened to free speech in this country?’
Roberta smiled. ‘Some would say it got repealed when President Cowley came to power.’ She turned to Rocky. ‘But all these authorities do have a point. You have to understand. Stan is still only nineteen. Suppose he were to continue down this path, as he matures further? He is no ordinary preacher; he is a Next. Human culture may not be – ready – for his message. Surely you can imagine the damage he could do—’
‘Yeah, you trotted out that line before,’ Sally said coldly. ‘But I’m starting to suspect you Next have another agenda in play here, don’t you? Stan Berg thinks we should work together. You brainiacs, us dim-bulbs. He says we share a deeper common humanity, and together we should build on that. What a naive young man he is,’ she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘What a challenge to your pride—’
Rocky blurted, ‘I can see what you’re really doing here. All of you.’ They broke off and looked at him. ‘You all want rid of him. The company, so they can build their beanstalk. The government, so he stops stirring people up. You Next, so he stops driving us out of your control. You’re ganging up on him, combining your interests, getting him out of the way. It suits you all to get rid of him, whatever is going on in this distant place, in New Springfield. And you want me to help you take him away?’
Sally covered Rocky’s hand with hers, an unexpected touch of humanity. ‘It’s not just that, Rocky. Yes – all these characters want to see him out of the way. It’s how prophets are usually treated, after all. But there’s a kernel of truth under the manipulation. We really do need him.’
‘We?’
‘All of mankind.’ She smiled, a twisted grin. ‘Both flavours.’ She glanced at Roberta. ‘No more arguments, no more manipulation, no more justification. Let’s just tell him.’
And so Sally and Roberta, slowly, steadily, with no dramatics or visual aids, tried to tell Rocky the story of Earth West 1,217,756, of New Springfield. And of the creatures called silver beetles, and what they were doing to that world – and of the threat they might pose to the whole Long Earth, and a scattered mankind.
When it was done, Rocky felt overwhelmed. ‘I don’t see how Stan can help you with this. What’s he going to do, preach at these – beetles?’
Roberta said now, ‘Rocky, you’ll have to trust us.’
‘Trust you? I don’t trust any of you Next.’ He faced Sally. ‘But you. If I ask you straight questions, will you tell me the truth?’
She nodded gravely. ‘If I can.’
‘Is this necessary, really? Does this – closing up – have to be done?’
‘Yes. Yes, I believe it does.’
‘Does it have to be Stan? Why?’
Sally spread her hands. ‘It’s hard to explain. A sufficiently advanced stepper isn’t just a traveller. He, she, interacts with the way the Long Earth itself is put together . . . And Stan is the most advanced stepper I ever came across. It’s as if he understands the Long Earth better than anybody before or since. And that’s what makes him so powerful.’
Roberta said with dogged patience, ‘It’s all theory, frankly. One point, however, is that Sally here is going to have to work with him on this. Coach him.’
Sally grunted. ‘More like, we’ll be learning together . . .’
‘Why not just ask for his help? Why this press-ganging?’
There was an awkward silence. Sally said at last, ‘Because, Rocky, we can’t afford for him to refuse.’
‘And if Stan does this – if I give Stan up to you – will he survive?’
Sally sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he won’t survive.’
Rocky tried to take it all in. ‘Will he be alone?’
‘No,’ Sally said firmly. ‘I can promise you that. Personally.’ And she took hold of Rocky’s hand.
50
THEY WASTED NO time. If it had to be done, they’d decided, it was best done immediately.
It was evening when they got back to the elevator base site. Stan was still on his plinth, with his followers and some of the other workers. His sermon had triggered a bull session that looked like it could go on all night, Sally thought.
Rocky made his way through the crowd towards Stan.
Sally stood back, with Roberta Golding and Stan’s mother.
‘Good,’ Roberta said, watching. ‘Rocky’s doing well. Nice and calm. Just a friend coming to bring Stan home to his family. Not like an arrest at all . . .’
Martha said dully, ‘The way Rocky’s chatting to the followers as he passes – you’d never know what’s in his soul. He always was a good friend to Stan. But he’s going to have to carry this with him, the memory of what he’s doing, for the rest of his life, isn’t he?’
Impulsively, Roberta hugged her. ‘I guess there’s no greater price a friend can pay.’
Rocky reached Stan. He grinned, accepted a bottle of beer, and pointed to Stan’s mother at the back of the crush. Stan shrugged, looking like he was apologizing to his fan club. Then he picked up his jacket and began to make his way out of the peaceable crowd, Rocky’s arm around his shoulders, with no resistance from his followers.
Roberta murmured, ‘I once told you that you’d lose him, Martha. One way or another. At least this is a good way, a positive way—’
‘No,’ Martha snarled. ‘There is no good way.’ And before the boys got back through the crowd, she broke away from the women and hurried off.
51
ON EARTH WEST 1,217,756, the end game was close, everybody said.
Joshua could sense it. If you stood out in the open on this world, under the streaming sky, you could feel the shuddering of the planet as more and more energy was poured into it by the beetles’ globe-spanning motor. And you could see the quickening spin in the almost perceptible shifting of the shadows, on the rare occasions when the sun was visible through the cloud.
As seen from orbit by the small observation satellites thrown up by the Cowley, the spinning world now looked like Jupiter or Saturn, striped with horizontal bands of cloud. Two-hundred-miles-per-hour hurricanes stalked the oceans and spilled on to the land, battering the already devastated coastal regions. Inland the cores of the once-global forests still stoutly resisted the storms, but only a handful of the furball mammals, living underground or deep in the trunks of trees, had recently been seen.
The day was reduced to less than eight hours. As estimate
d by Ken Bowring and Margarita Jha of the Cowley, this world’s rotational energy had increased nine-fold, gravity at the equator was down three per cent, and the planet’s flattening as it spun up was now causing crustal distortions of a couple of hundred kilometres – far more than the maximum thickness of the crust itself. Joshua couldn’t believe such numbers. And it was getting worse. Lobsang and George guessed that the beetles’ coupling of Earth to sun was being enhanced by some means more advanced than the obvious Dyson-motor latitudinal viaducts and streaming moon rocks – some means of transferring huge quantities of spin energy and momentum that human observers were not equipped to recognize . . . But there was no time left to learn.
Joshua, however, didn’t need science measurements to apprehend the unfolding tragedy here. And it seemed to him that the ultimate possibility was at last being taken seriously, among the scientists and military people, Lobsang and his Next allies. The possibility that the goal of the beetles was not the transformation of this world into some new form, but its destruction.
And that made the final decision, about whether to go ahead with the operation the military people had come to call the Cauterizing, an easy one to make.
Team Stan, as the boy himself had called them – Stan, George and Sally – gathered in the lee of Manning Hill, on the north-western periphery. On the summit of the hill still stood the wind-smashed remains of the home George and Agnes had lived in with their adopted son.
The townsfolk had long gone, the Irwins and the Bambers and the Todds and the Claytons and the rest, gone with their dreams, off to build a new home someplace else. Nikos Irwin, who with his dog Rio had first encountered the beetles in their mine working, had gone with his family – but Rio had died a few months back, and left her bones in the ground of this doomed Earth. It was less easy to be sure that the rest of this planet was empty of people too. Before the weather had closed in the Cowley had undertaken spiralling tours of the North American continent, broadcasting warnings, setting up automated radio stations; there was even a comsat flung into orbit, similarly blasting out instructions to step away – as if, Joshua supposed, anybody still struggling to hang on to this spinning-top of a world needed to be told. Well, if anybody stayed for the end game it was their decision, their responsibility; they must be able to guess what was coming.
Whereas Lobsang – George Abrahams, Agnes’s husband – Sally Linsay, and young Stan Berg, who were staying for the end, didn’t need to guess. They would get to see it for themselves.
The final round of goodbyes was ghastly.
Joshua watched Stan Berg, wearing robust military-specification survival gear that almost fit him, trying to deal with his mother Martha, and Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who seemed so drawn to him. Stan for his part seemed more concerned for Rocky Lewis, the boyhood friend who everybody muttered had ‘betrayed’ Stan.
‘You won’t be forgotten,’ Rocky said thickly, his guilt obvious.
Stan grinned. ‘You betcha. Have a drink on me with the stalk jacks under that freakin’ space cable.’
‘We’ll remember you. Everything you said and did – you had so little time – we’ll remember it all, and pass it on.’
‘Just clean up my jokes, will ya?’
Rocky’s face worked. ‘Stan, I—’
Stan grabbed him, hugged him close, patted his back. ‘Don’t say it. You did what you had to do. You did what was right.’
‘Not everybody sees it that way.’
‘What matters more, what I say or what they say? And I say it’s OK. You remember that.’ He released Rocky.
Now it was his mother’s turn. Unlike Rocky she did not submit to the hug Stan offered. Joshua thought she blazed with anger, a fire visible in her face, her posture. Maybe it was a way of staving off the loss. Stan’s father, Jez, wasn’t here at all; he’d never followed Stan to this place, his Golgotha.
‘Mom, I—’
‘Don’t say it. You’ve said enough. All your words. That’s what they used to take you away from me. First those losers and chancers who surrounded you in Miami. They’re already turning you into a cult, you and your foolishness. A cult and a corporation. Do you know they already registered your image rights? That’s the kind of people they are. And now this.’ She turned and glared at Roberta. ‘These people with their manipulation and their fancy theorizing.’
‘Mom, it’s not just theorizing. I’ve been through it myself, the arguments. I think they’re right about what’s going to become of this world. The Cauterizing might work.’
‘I don’t care. Nothing justifies this, for me—’ Something seemed to break in her. She turned and blundered away.
Stan pursued her. ‘Mom. Mom! . . .’
Now Agnes came to Joshua, arm in arm with George, the homely elderly-appearing ambulant who had been her husband here – the copy of Lobsang who was going to be left behind here, in New Springfield, with Stan. Agnes was still wearing her pioneer gear, the uniform she had adopted on coming here to build a home on this doomed planet.
Agnes took Joshua’s hand. ‘It’s going to be a long ride home, isn’t it? You, me, Martha, Rocky. The other survivors of all this. It’s Rocky I feel for the most.’
‘Well, that’s you, Agnes. Always drawn to the damaged children.’
‘Isn’t that a good instinct? Believe me, the damage that’s already been done to that boy will haunt him through his life. Even after his death he’ll probably be vilified for his betrayal. There are precedents, you know.’ She turned reluctantly to George, still clinging to his arm. ‘But you – must you stay?’
He smiled, an elderly, elegant, kindly gentleman, wearing scuffed, sturdy frontier clothes, like Agnes’s. ‘Well, we’ve been through this, Agnes. I can’t take part in the Cauterizing itself. But I, with my long-lost brother, did contribute a great deal to the theory – to the mathematics. And since the operation is largely mathematical, I can lend a great deal of support to—’
‘It doesn’t have to be you. You have a spare.’ And Agnes glanced over at the second copy of Lobsang, the ambulant unit from the world of the Traversers. He, it, wore a modest coverall, that one sleeve sewn up. He stood apart from the group, utterly still, statue-like, younger in appearance than George, his face empty of expression. ‘He knows everything you do.’
‘Yet we’re not identical, and never can be.’
‘Why stay? For the science? You’ll be trapped behind the Cauterizing. You’ll never be able to report back. Never be able to synch, to download your memories into those big banks at your transEarth Institute or—’
‘There may be a way, some day. Why, Stella Welch and the Cowley science staff have seeded this world with probes and data-gathering equipment, with the same reservations in mind. You may as well measure what you can, even if you’re not sure you can retrieve the data. And besides—’ For a moment, a very human resentment twisted his artificial face. He said more thickly, ‘Agnes, this was our world. My world, my home, with you. Now it is threatened with destruction. I will be the only one of us homesteaders who can be present. I am not the man I was before I came here with you, Agnes. I have invested much of myself in this place – as did we all, the Irwins and the rest, the Poulsons before them. I must see this. I must remember. As best I can.’
Agnes took his hands in hers. ‘What about all you “invested” in Ben? You should have seen him when I left him, an eight-year-old boy alone in a cabin on a military airship, crying his heart out.’
‘There’s nothing more I could do for him. Nothing more I could say.’
Joshua said, ‘At least you’ll be out of reach of the prosecutors, after you’ve once again saved civilization as we know it.’
George grinned. ‘Even now, old-movie gags, Joshua?’
Joshua, giving in to an impulse, went over to the ambulant and hugged him. ‘In spite of everything I’ll miss you.’
‘Please, Joshua. Not in front of the Next.’
Agnes snapped, ‘Oh, you’re impossible,
the pair of you.’
George glanced now at his Navy-issue watch, its presence on his wrist a symbol of a definitive break from the timeless ethos of New Springfield. ‘Please excuse me, there are final preparations . . .’ Gently he disengaged his arm from Agnes’s. ‘We’ll still have time before you go.’ He walked away.
Joshua put his arm around Agnes’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s typical of Lobsang that as soon as I decide I’m leaving him, he leaves me. But the truth is I lost him the day the Cowley came, and he took it on himself to speak up for the community. Or maybe when the problems with this world became too obvious to ignore. Or maybe I never had him at all – thanks to Sally Linsay, who planted us on this doomed world in the first place, and I’m damn sure she knew what she was doing.’
Joshua shrugged. ‘She may have felt she had no choice. That’s what the Next say. They can see their way through to an optimal end to the game, and so have no choice about how to play it. I sometimes think there’s something of the Next in Sally. If she glimpsed this end-game all the way back then, if she sensed something wrong here, well, she was right, wasn’t she? And if that’s true, she’s paying the price herself.’
‘Good,’ Agnes said with almost a snarl, and Joshua was taken aback. ‘There,’ she said more calmly. ‘I got that out of my system. Now I can forgive her . . . And here she comes, right on cue. I’ll give you some time together.’ Agnes squeezed Joshua’s hand, and walked away after George, without another glance at Sally.
Joshua and Sally faced each other. As ever she wore her travelling gear, her shapeless hat, her sleeveless jacket with all the pockets, her pack on her back, ready to move.
‘So this is it,’ Joshua said.
‘I guess.’
‘You really have to stay?’
She shrugged. ‘Stan has the raw ability, but I’m the more experienced stepper. They need me to help him.’ She seemed calm, accepting. ‘I always suspected it would finish up like this.’
The Long Utopia Page 31