The Long Utopia (4 page)

But here was Rio, safe and sound. She submitted to being grabbed and petted. Then she was first to scramble out of the pit and head for home.

Nikos said nothing to his parents about his adventure in the old Poulson place.

The fear gripped him for a whole day and a night. He couldn’t even sleep for thinking about it.

But on the second day he went back to the fringe of the ragged clearing, and inspected the Poulson house from the safety of the cover of the trees.

By the third day he was going back in, with his buddies. Back into the big cellar.

J
OSHUA
V
ALIENTÉ’S
son Rod called for him at the old family home in Reboot, in a stepwise footprint of New York State a hundred thousand steps West of the Datum. Joshua met him on the porch. It was a little after midnight on May 1, 2052.

‘Happy birthday, Dad.’

Joshua shook the hand of his only child warmly. At twenty, the boy was taller than Joshua, taller than his mother. He had her paler complexion, his father’s darker hair. He wore clothes of treated leather and what looked like spun wool dyed a pale green. In fact he looked alien in the lantern light of the Green homestead, but comfortable in himself, in his own skin. And he looked like he must fit right in with the shifting, ever fragmenting, kaleidoscopic communities of the stepwise forests to which he seemed increasingly drawn.

And he’s Rod now
, Joshua reminded himself.
We named him Daniel Rodney, the boy was always Dan, and the man is Rod. His choice.
Joshua simultaneously felt pride in this handsome, confident young man, and a stab of regret at the evident distance between them. ‘Thanks for coming, son. And thanks for making this trip with me. Or the chunk you’re doing anyhow.’

‘Well, we haven’t done it yet. And you haven’t seen the ship I got for you to ride in.’

‘Your “stepping aircraft”. You were kind of enigmatic.’

‘It’s not a twain, Dad. Nothing like that big old ship we rode to the Datum when I was a kid. What was it called?’

‘The
Gold Dust.
’ That was Helen, Joshua’s ex-wife, Rod’s mother; she came out of the house now and wrapped her son in a hug. Helen was dressed plainly, and kept her greying strawberry-blonde hair pulled back in a practical bun. On coming back to Reboot, after her marriage to Joshua had broken up, she’d resumed her profession of midwife, and by now was pretty senior in the stepwise-extended community of New Scarsdale. She was strong, you could see that, strong in the upper body, strong and competent. On such a birthday as this Joshua was very aware of his own age, but Helen herself would be forty next year.

And out came the house’s final inhabitant. Helen’s father Jack, leaning precariously on a stick, was in his seventies. ‘My boy, my boy.’ He wrapped his free arm around Rod’s shoulders, and Rod submitted with good grace.

Helen bustled around. ‘Come inside and let’s get this door closed. It might be May but the nights are still cold.’ She led them all into the house’s main room, the core of the structure and the first to be built, where, as a pioneer family in the years before she’d met Joshua, all the Greens had once lived in a cosy heap . . . All the Greens, except of course Rod the phobic, who they’d left behind in Datum Madison: Helen’s brother Rod, to her son a mysterious lost uncle, and whose name he had chosen to adopt.

Rod stood there awkwardly, by a table laden with food, back in a room into which he evidently didn’t feel he fitted any more. ‘Mom, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’

Helen smiled. ‘You knew I would, though, didn’t you? Look, I know you two are going to be keen to get away—’

Jack growled, ‘Not even stopping by to say hi to Aunt Katie and her girls, and the grandkids? You know how they look up to you, the great twain driver.’

‘I’m not a twain driver any more, Granddad.’

‘But even so—’

‘I’m only here for Dad.’

‘Fool stunt!’

‘If Dad wants to cross a hundred thousand worlds, all the way back to the Datum, on his birthday, a single day, fine by me. We’ll fly most of it. I want to do nine hundred miles to the Wisconsin footprint by dawn, and after that another six hours’ flying and more stepping over Madison.’

‘If you don’t break down on the way.
Damn
fool stunt if you ask me.’

‘Nobody is asking, Jack,’ Joshua said, gently enough. ‘And after Rod drops me off I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

Helen rolled her eyes at her son. ‘With Sally Linsay! Some birthday treat
that
will be. Two antisocial old curmudgeons stomping across the Long Earth complaining about how fine it used to be when there were no people to mess it up – none but
them.
’

Rod shrugged gracefully. ‘It’s Dad’s choice, Mom. You’re only fifty once.’

‘Damn fool stunt,’ Jack said again.

Helen insisted, ‘Well, if you won’t see your family, and if you won’t let me fuss over you for even one night, then at least you can let me refuel you. You’ve a long journey ahead. So here, there are home-made cookies with plenty of sugar, and sandwiches – the pork’s frozen but it’s good – and iced tea, and hot coffee, and lemonade. I know it’s midnight but who cares? Sit. Eat.’

Joshua and Rod shared a glance, shrugged as they used to when Rod was a kid named Dan and they’d both known not to argue, and sat at the table. Even Jack awkwardly lowered his bulk into a chair. They filled their plates with food, and helped themselves to drink.

‘Too damn late for all this,’ Jack grumbled, as he bit into a cookie the size of a small plate, wincing as he tried to lift his hand to his mouth.

Joshua knew that Jack, unfortunately for him, was typical of his generation, the first Long Earth pioneers. The labour he’d put in during those early years building Reboot, after a months-long
trek out here with the young Helen and the rest of the family, had bequeathed Jack crippling arthritis in old age. But he had stubbornly refused expensive Low Earth drugs, and turned away even basic help. Even agreeing to come live with Helen had been the end result of a war of attrition mounted by Helen, when she’d come back home from Hell-Knows-Where, and her older sister Katie who had always stayed in Reboot with her own family. Jack still wrote, or tried to, on rough local-made paper, with gnarled old hands holding crude local-made quill pens. Helen had told Joshua he was working on a memoir of the heroic days of Valhalla’s Gentle Revolution, when the peoples of the Long Earth had stood up for their independence from the Datum: a brief drama barely remembered now, Joshua suspected, by Rod and his comber friends, as they faded steadily into the endless stepwise green.

Anyhow Joshua knew Jack was right about the lateness of the hour. Even though many of the younger generation were slipping away, the core population in Reboot still made a living off the farms they and their parents had carved out of the native forests, starting around a quarter of a century ago. And, following the rhythms of their animals’ lives, they generally retired with the setting sun. Midnight was a foreign country to farmers.

But Helen said now, ‘Oh, hush, Dad. When I’m doing my mid-wifing we’re up all hours. Newborn babies don’t keep to any clock. Why,
you
get up in the night to make me coffee when I come stumbling in before the cocks crow. And besides, if this is the only time Rod has to be with us, I’m not about to sleep it away. More tea?’

‘Not yet, thanks.’ Rod looked uncomfortable. ‘Mom, listen – I heard you have some news too.’

Helen raised her eyebrows. ‘Gossip travels fast, even across the Long Earth. Well, I’m not sure what you heard, Rod, but the truth is—’

Jack cackled. ‘She has a new boyfriend. That pasty-faced kid Ben Doak!’

Joshua forced himself not to grin. He was glad he’d had time to absorb this news already himself. By now it didn’t feel so bad; it was just another layer on top of the lump of wistful sadness and regret he’d been carrying around inside since his marriage had broken up. And Ben Doak was kind of geeky.

Helen snapped, ‘Oh, shut up, Dad. He’s
not
a kid, for God’s sake, he’s only a couple of years younger than me . . . You know him, Rod. He was another of the first settlers, him and his family. We got to know the Doaks pretty well even during the trek. He has a couple of kids of his own, younger than you, and he lost his wife to a forest disease that hit us hard a year back—’

‘I’ve been back since then, Mom.’

‘Sorry. And since I lost
my
husband to another kind of disease,’ with a glance at Joshua, ‘we thought we’d – well – join forces.’

Jack snorted. ‘Sounds like a military alliance, not a marriage. You ask her this, Rod, because I’ve tried and I get no answer. Does she actually
love
this Doak boy?’

Evidently this was an old argument between the two of them. Helen flared back, ‘For all the time you’ve spent out here, Dad, you still think it’s like Datum Madison, where
you
grew up. Full of people coming and going, full of choice for company. Where you have the luxury of waiting until you’ve found somebody you
could
fall in love with. Out here it’s different.’

Rod took his mother’s hand. ‘I do understand, Mom. It’s the same for us.’

Jack said, ‘Sure. Running around in the forest like Robin Hood and his outlaws. You’re not in one of those “extended marriages” we hear about, are you?’

‘If I was, I wouldn’t blab about it to you, Granddad, would I?’

Jack thought that over, and winked at Rod. ‘Fair enough.’

‘Mom, I will come back for the wedding.’

‘That’s good.’ But she looked briefly anxious. ‘It’s not settled yet, the date. How will I contact you? I mean—’

‘I’ll just know, don’t worry.’ He added mischievously, ‘Actually it sometimes helps being related to the great Joshua Valienté. People take a bit more notice of what you’re doing. They pass on messages.’

Helen gave Joshua a dismissive look. ‘I know it’s his birthday, but don’t make him any more big-headed. And he knows as well as I do that I’d much rather he spent this big day with his family instead of going off on yet another dumb Long Earth jaunt.’

‘A jaunt with my son,’ Joshua pointed out. ‘Some of it anyhow. Quality time.’

Jack said, ‘It’s only because you couldn’t manage the trip any other way, you old fossil.’

Rod laughed. ‘And speaking of the journey, we need to get going. Mom, thanks – these cookies are delicious, and the sugar will help keep me awake.’

Jack grunted. ‘It keeps
me
awake knowing how much we had to barter for that sugar. They use the damn stuff as currency out here.’

‘Could I get a doggy bag? . . .’

So the midnight party, such as it was, broke up. There was a final packing up, a stiff hug and handshake for Joshua from ex-wife and father-in-law, a last slurp of strong coffee.

Then Rod, carrying a lantern, led his father out of the little township and down a forest trail to the river, where there still stood a stone commemorating the too-brief life of Helen’s mother, Jack’s wife.

And where, in a clearing, Rod had landed a small plane.

T
HE AIRCRAFT’S HULL
was a smooth white ceramic, unmarked save for a registration number and the inevitable Black Corporation Buddhist-monk logo that marked a capability to fly stepwise. The wings were stubby, the tailplane fat. The main body was a squat cylinder, just big enough for a small cockpit and couches for four passengers.

Inside, the plane had a striking smell of new machinery, of cleanliness – like a new car maybe, Joshua thought, a stray memory from back in the first decades of the twenty-first century when he was growing up, and the Datum was the only world there was, and it had been full of cars, new and otherwise. Once their bits of luggage were stowed, and Rod and Joshua were strapped into the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, Rod passed his hands over built-in tablets that filled the small cockpit with their glow. Joshua didn’t recognize a single aspect of the virtual instrumentation.

‘You know I’m not really a gadget kind of guy. But this is pretty wicked.’

Rod winced. ‘“Wicked”? How old did you say you were, Dad? Hold on to your hat, the take-off is kind of sudden.’

With a hum of a biofuel engine and a subdued roar of jets, the craft jolted forward across a grassy sward, bumping a little on the uneven ground. There was nothing like a runway at Reboot; there weren’t enough aerial visitors to justify it – and most of them came in airships that didn’t need a runway at all. Evidently this little
plane didn’t need a runway either. After a remarkably short taxi, it leapt into the dark sky.

They didn’t step immediately. Rod had the plane bank on autopilot in a wide, lazy circle as he checked the Stepper box at his waist, and then opened up a small pack of pharmaceuticals and began to guzzle pills. As far as stepping was concerned Rod had mixed ancestry: his father, Joshua, was the world’s prototype natural stepper, but there were phobics on his mother’s side – those unable to step at all, such as his notorious uncle, whose name he’d taken. Rod himself was somewhere near typical. With a Stepper box, Rod could step maybe three or four times a minute, but he’d be hit by nausea each time, and needed treatments to control the reaction. Luckily for him, by the time he was trying to fulfil his boyhood dream of flying the twains – the great stepwise-bound freight-carrying airships – the anti-nausea drugs had reached a pinnacle of effectiveness, and steps coming every few seconds, or even faster, were manageable.

This self-medication went unremarked by Joshua. Although he did wonder if the modern treatments still turned your piss blue.

The cabin windows were big and generous, and as the ground opened up beneath him Joshua was able to see the scattered lights of Reboot, and the neighbouring farms and shepherds’ shelters. But they hadn’t risen far before the settlement was lost in the continent-spanning forest, a deep green-black sea on this moonless night. ‘Makes you think how few we are, on worlds like this, even after all these years. And after all the breeding we’ve done.’

Rod grunted. ‘To me and my buddies this is normal. A planet’s not
supposed
to glow in the dark.’ He stowed away the pharma kit. ‘So you ready?’

‘Let’s go.’

Rod tapped a corner of another of his glowing screens.

The first step was a faint jolt, like a bump in the road
– and suddenly they were in a rainstorm – and out of it with the second step.

After that, worlds flapped past Joshua’s view, one after another, variations on a theme of black, with not a light to be seen on the ground below. From the beginning the stepping was faster than Joshua’s heartbeat, which was a little disconcerting, like too-fast music. But as the step rate increased the inevitable juddering sensation soon smoothed out, to be masked, in fact, by the faint vibrations of the smooth-running engines as the plane settled into its run, heading generally geographic west, towards the heart of the continent and the footprints of Wisconsin, even as the stepping continued.

‘Nice machine,’ Joshua said.

‘Sure. “Wicked.”’

‘I won’t ask how much you paid to use it. Or how you earned the money in the first place, living the way you do.’

‘I’m making my living my own way, which you know nothing about. Look, here I am for you, just as you asked. You wanted us to spend time. Fine. This ride is my gift to you, Dad. Happy birthday, OK? But why the hell are you doing this?’

‘Why the hell not? I’m fifty. I’ve spent my life wandering the Long Earth. Why
not
cross a hundred thousand worlds in a day? Why not mark it with a stunt like this, while I still can?’

‘I hate to tell you, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a speed record.’

Joshua shrugged. ‘I don’t care about comparisons. I never much cared what other people thought of me, as long as they left me alone.’

‘Well, maybe you should care, Dad. I mean, like Mom said, you could have marked your birthday with something which wouldn’t have involved you being out here all alone.’

‘Like what? A barbecue?’ Joshua looked at his son sideways. Rod’s face was softly illuminated by the glow of the control tablets. ‘Now you sound like your mother. Or your grandfather. Once Dan
was going to be a twain driver. Now here’s Rod the comber, who knows it all.’

Rod replied irritably, ‘I wanted to fly twains when I was a little boy, for God’s sake. And I got to do it, for a while. But there aren’t the opportunities now – you know that.’

It was true enough. Twains still flew locally, especially across the more industrialized Low Earths, but the big Datum–Valhalla route, a ‘Long Mississippi’ that had spanned a million worlds with a bridge of trade and cultural exchange, had withered after the Datum Earth had been effectively knocked out by Yellowstone. And then, after the catastrophic winter of 2046 and a new wave of emigration from the battered Datum, most Long Earth trade had shrunk back to relatively short-range exchanges.

Still, changing career plans was one thing; changing your name was a different kind of statement.

Joshua hesitated before saying, ‘I think it’s disturbed your mother that you’ve started to use your uncle’s name, you know.’

‘It’s my middle name. You gave it to me.’

‘True, but—’

‘This is the hidden secret of the Greens, isn’t it? Jack the great political firebrand, my mother the midwife: once hero trekkers, now the heartbeat of Reboot. But they are only out here because they abandoned their phobic son back on Earth, and look what happened to
him
in the end.’

After Helen’s eighteen-year-old homealone brother had played a part in the anti-stepper terrorist nuking of Datum Madison, Wisconsin, he’d spent a lifetime in custodial institutions. He’d died in there only recently, of an infection he’d caught in hospital. Joshua realized with a shock that he’d committed his single, terrible crime when younger than Rod was now.

‘OK, but you’re kind of throwing this in their faces. Jack’s particularly. You shouldn’t judge them, Rod. They just couldn’t find a way to make it work for everybody.’

‘We all make mistakes, eh, Dad?’

‘Yes, frankly. You just haven’t made yours yet, son. Or maybe you just don’t know it.’

‘Thanks for that. Now maybe you should shut up and let me fly this thing.’

‘Rod, I—’

‘Forget it.’

After that, much of the night was spent in not very companionable silence. Long hours of darkness which Joshua spent much of beating himself up for what he’d said, or hadn’t said, not for the first time where his family was concerned.

Maybe Joshua slept a little. He suspected Rod napped too, leaving the flying to the autopilot. Even the flaring of an occasional Joker did not disturb them.

The sun came up on all the worlds of the Long Earth.

Some fifty thousand steps from the Datum they were still deep in the thick band of worlds known as the Mine Belt: cooler and less well forested than the Earths of the Corn Belt, which began around the location of Reboot and stretched away to the stepwise West. The Mine Belt worlds were mostly exploited only as sources of minerals of various kinds, either for local use or for export to the Datum and the Low Earths – though even that kind of trade was dwindling now. But there were herds of animals to be seen, drawn to the water courses and lakes, mostly four-legged mammals but not much like anything that populated the human cultural imagination: things like giant camels, and things like elephants with oddly shaped tusks, stalked by things like huge cats. As they stepped, the herds, dark flowing masses, were there and gone in an eye blink.

They had a silent breakfast of Helen’s cookies and lukewarm coffee from a flask.

Around eight a.m. the character of the worlds below changed again, subtly. This was the Ice Belt, a band of periodically glaciated
worlds, of which Datum Earth – at least in its primordial state, before humanity got to work – appeared to have been a typical example. These Earths were cooler, with open prairie and grasslands, the forests shrunk back to patches of evergreen, and tundra in the far north. As Joshua had learned during his own forays into the Long Earth, and on that first journey of exploration with Lobsang two decades ago, when you crossed the Long Earth it was like flying through the branches of some tremendous tree of possibilities and probabilities. The closer you got to the Datum, the more links in the chain of coin-toss cosmic accidents that had led to the peculiar circumstances of the home world locked into place, and the more familiar the landscapes became. So now, on the sparsely populated grasslands below, they saw animals of the kinds alongside which humans had evolved, even if said animals hadn’t necessarily survived to feature in the modern world: mastodons and mammoths, deer and bison. In most of these Earths the epochal collision of the Americas, North and South, must have taken place, for they saw immigrants from the south, such as giant sloths and armadillos the size of small cars.

But, apart from the very occasional pinprick of a campfire, or the even rarer lights of a small township, there was no sign of mankind.

Joshua remarked, ‘Nobody at home. And yet you still meet people, especially back on the Datum, who will tell you we conquered the Long Earth.’

Rod shrugged. ‘So what? Why do you need to conquer, or not conquer, anything? Why not just accept things the way they
are
? Because even if they do change, you can always just step away . . .’

And Joshua saw that that really was how Rod thought about the world, or worlds: as a kind of endless
now
, an endless
here
, a place where location and time didn’t matter – and endlessly generous, a place you didn’t need to work at, didn’t need to build on, or fix. A place of endless escape. Joshua felt a sudden, intense jumble of
emotions. Born in the Long Earth, Rod was of a generation that was forever divided from Joshua’s by the great chasm of Step Day, and never could their world views be reconciled.

He couldn’t help it. He reached over and grabbed Rod’s shoulder, squeezing it hard. But Rod failed to respond.

It was a relief for both of them, Joshua suspected, when noon arrived and the plane banked over an uninhabited footprint of the Madisonian lakes, precisely three thousand steps West of the Datum. A single thread of smoke rose up from a campfire by the shore.

And as the plane began its final approach, a woman by the fire got to her feet and waved.