Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

‘We can stop them,’ Abbey said forcefully. ‘There’s enough people taking part in the movement today to block the roads and turn back all those middle-class tax-avoiding scum. Murray didn’t think it through; half of the police have pissed off through his rathole. Who is going to protect the responsibility-deniers now? People power is going to come back with a vengeance today. This is when the working class finds its voice again. And it’s going to say: no more. You see.’

n) Local Authority Executives.

o) All quango members.

p) Stockbrokers.

q) Weapons designers and manufacturers.

r) Arts Council executives.

s) Pension fund managers.

t) Cast and production staff of all TV soaps.

u) All sex crime offenders.

v) Child behavioural experts.

w) Call centre owners and managers.

As ever, the M11 was horrendous, a solid queue of bad-tempered traffic. It took us nearly two hours to creep from the M25 to the Stansted junction. Actually, not as ever: I was smiling most of the way. It didn’t bother me any more. I just kept thinking this was the last time I ever had to drive down one of this country’s abysmal, potholed, clogged, anachronistic nineteen-sixties roads. Never again was I going to come home ranting about why can’t we have Autobahns, or eight-lane freeways like they’ve got in America. From now on my moaning was going to be reserved for sixteen-legged alien dinosaurs tramping over the vegetable garden.

The estate car in front had a bumper sticker with a cartoon of angry Gordon Brown using a phone to hammer on the side of the wormhole. Tax for the memory was printed underneath. We’d been seeing more and more pro-exodus stickers as we crawled our way north. I reckoned that all the vehicles sharing the off road with us were heading to New Suffolk. After all those months of furtive preparation it was kind of comforting finally being amongst your own kind.

‘It’s the wormhole, isn’t it?’ Steve asked cautiously. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’re going to take a look at what’s there.’

‘Are we going through ?’ Olivia asked, all wide eyes and nervous enthusiasm.

‘I think so. Don’t you? Now we’ve come all this way, it’ll be fun.’ I saw the sign for assembly park F2, and started indicating.

‘But they’re bad people on the other side,’ Steve said. ‘Mum said. They’re all Tory traitors.’

‘Has she been there herself?’

‘No way!’

‘Then she doesn’t really know what it’s like on the other side, does she?’

The kids looked at each other. ‘Suppose not,’ Steve said.

‘Just because you don’t agree with someone, doesn’t make them bad. We’ll take a look round for ourselves and find out what’s true and what’s not. That’s fair isn’t it?’

‘When are we coming back?’ Steve asked.

‘Don’t know. That depends how nice it is on the new planet. We might want to stay a while.’

Zoe was giving me a disapproving look. I shrugged at her. She didn’t understand, you’ve got to acclimatize kids slowly to anything this big and new.

‘Is Mummy coming?’ Olivia asked.

‘If she wants to, she can come with us. Of course she can,’ I said.

Zoe let out a little hiss of exasperation.

‘Will I have to go to school?’ Steve asked.

‘Everybody goes to school no matter what planet they’re on,’ Zoe said.

‘Bummer.’

‘Not nice,’ Zoe squealed happily.

I found the entrance to park F2 and pulled in off the road. It was a broad open field hired out to newsuffolklife.co by the farmer. Hundreds of vehicles had spent all summer driving over it, reducing the grass to shredded wisps of straw pressed down into the dry iron-hard soil. Today, twenty-odd lorries were parked up at the far end, including three refrigerated containers, and a couple of fuel tankers. Over seventy cars, people carriers, transit vans, and 4x4s were clustered around the lorries; most of them contained families, with kids and parents out stretching their legs before the final haul. The fields on either side replicated similar scenes. In fact all the countryside around the wormhole was the same. It made me feel a lot more confident.

I drew up beside a marshal, who was standing just inside the gate, and showed him our card. He looked at it and grinned as he ticked us off his clipboard. ‘You’re the doc, huh?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Fine. There’s about a dozen more cars to come and we’re all set. I’m Barry, your community convoy liaison, so I’ll be travelling with you all the way to your new home. Any problems, come and see me.’

‘Sure.’

‘You want to check over the medical equipment you’ll be taking, make sure it’s all there? Your new neighbours have been going through the rest of the stuff.’

I drove over to the other cars and we all climbed out. Several men were up in the lorries, looking round the crates and pallets that were inside. Given how much we’d spent between us, I was glad to see how thorough they were being checking off the inventory. In theory the equipment and supplies on the lorries were enough to turn us into a self-sufficient community over the next year.

‘This shouldn’t take long,’ I told Zoe. ‘We need to be certain. In the land of the new arrivals, the owner of the machine tool is king.’

‘We’ll go meet people,’ she said.

I met a few of them myself as I tracked down the five crates of medical supplies and equipment. They seemed all right — decent types. A little over-eager in their greetings, as I suppose I was. But then we were going to spend an awful long time together. The rest of our lives, if everything went smoothly.

Half an hour later the last members of the group had arrived, we were satisfied everything we’d bought through newsuffolklife.co was with us, and the marshals were getting the convoy organised for the last segment on Earth. Put like that it sounded final and invigorating at the same time.

‘Where’s the wormhole?’ Steve asked plaintively as we got back into the BMW. ‘I want to see it.’

‘Two miles to go,’ Zoe said. ‘That’s all now.’

The lorries were first out of the assembly park and onto one of the new tarmac roads that led to the wormhole, with the rest of us following. There was a wide path on the left of the road. Backpackers marched along it, about ten abreast, a constant file of them. I couldn’t see the end of the line in either direction. They all had the same eager smile on their faces as they strode ever-closer to the wormhole. Zoe and I probably looked the same.

‘There!’ Olivia suddenly shouted. She was pointing at the trees on the other side of the backpackers. For a moment I was confused, it was as if a dawn sun was shining through the trunks. Then we cleared the end of the little wood, and we could see the wormhole directly.

The zero-length gap in space-time was actually manifesting as a sphere three hundred yards in diameter. Murray had opened it so that the equator was at ground level, leaving a hemisphere protruding into the air. There was nothing solid, it was simply the place one planet ended and another began. You crossed the boundary, and New Suffolk stretched out in front of you. That was the notorious eye-twister which made a lot of people shiver and even flinch away. As you drew near the threshold, you could see an alien landscape dead ahead of you, inside the hemisphere. Yet it opened outwards, delivering a panoramic view. When you went through, you emerged on the outside of the corresponding hemisphere. There was no inside.

It was early morning on New Suffolk, where its ginger-tinted sun was rising, sending a rouge glow across the gap to light up the English countryside.