The Long Utopia

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?’

‘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.’