Terry Pratchett - The Long Utopia

Lobsang was silent, frozen.

Joshua sighed. ‘You never guessed, did you? For all your world-spanning intellect, for all your experiments with humanity, you’re still horribly naive about people, aren’t you, Lobsang?’ He glanced out of the window, looking south, the Atlantic to his left-hand side, choppy and foam-capped, the storm-lashed forest to his right. ‘No sign of any action down there. I think I’ll take some exercise. There’s a fold-out treadmill in back. Call me if anything changes.’

‘Oh, I will,’ said Lobsang stonily.

Joshua looked back with a grin. ‘Poor old Lobsang. You want me to gather a few laurel leaves? It wouldn’t hurt—’

‘Go take your run, Valienté.’

WHEN AGNES WALKED slowly up the trail back to her homestead on Manning Hill, bearing a basket of mushrooms she’d picked by the river, Marina Irwin came out to meet her.

Agnes smiled warily. Marina didn’t smile back, and Agnes might have expected that. This morning, with George/Lobsang away, Marina had agreed to watch Ben for a couple of hours. But the business of the Poulson house and Nikos had created some tension between the families. It was often this way, in Agnes’s experience, when you had to speak to parents about their children.

It took a moment for Agnes to register that the expression on Marina’s face was more serious than that.

She hurried forward. ‘Is something wrong? Is it Ben?’

‘No,’ Marina said quickly. ‘Not Ben. He’s fine, he’s napping. It’s your cat, I’m afraid. It’s Shi-mi.’

Agnes checked Ben, who was sleeping peacefully.

Then she looked for Shi-mi.

The cat was lying by the hearth. When Agnes arrived, Shi-mi tried to lift her head, but dropped back. ‘Agnes,’ she said, softly, scratchily. ‘I couldn’t reach my litter. I made a mess. I do apologize.’

Agnes ruffled the fur above Shi-mi’s eyes. ‘A quite convincing mess too.’

‘My decline was sudden. An abrupt shut-down. I imagine the process is realistic. Marina was very kind, but there was nothing she could do. I hope she is not distressed … Agnes?’

‘I’m here, sweetheart.’ The cat shuddered and yowled, and Agnes stroked her until she was still. ‘We still have choices, Shi-mi. You know that. We can take you to the gondola, the workshop—’

‘No. This is my place. I have lived here, these last years, as a true cat. People accept me. The mice fear me. I disdain the dogs. It is right that I, I … I-I-I-I—’

The sudden judder in her voice was mechanical, profoundly disturbing, an intrusion of artificiality – or in fact of reality, Agnes supposed. But she stroked Shi-mi’s side until she was calm again.

Shi-mi said now, ‘Agnes, say goodbye to Joshua for me. And Lobsang. And make sure you tell Maggie Kauffman what became of me. Tell her I expect Mac to crack a bottle of single malt – Auld Lang Syne , not the cheap stuff – in memory of a flea-bucket.’

‘I will. You have always been a good friend, Shi-mi.’

‘I am Ben’s cat now. That’s all I ever wanted to be, I’ve discovered. And I, I …’ Her voice tailed off into a soft, quite convincing purr. Then, as Agnes stroked her, she shuddered once, and her eyes opened wide, and their soft green LED light faded to dark.

THE NEXT TIME he called a halt, Lobsang stopped the twain dead, in the middle of the night, without warning. In the pitch dark, as the engines shut down, Joshua woke immediately.

In shorts and a T-shirt he rolled out of bed, pushed out through the partition into the body of the gondola, and stumbled into the co-pilot’s seat, beside Lobsang. A dashboard clock showed two a.m. The only internal light came from the control tablets, which underlit Lobsang’s face as he peered through the window. Outside, the moon, more than half full, was bright.

It was obvious why they had stopped.

Under the prow, looking south, Joshua saw ocean to his left-hand side, waves glistening like mercury in the moonlight. To the right lay land cloaked with forest green. And spanning the world from left to right, east to west, was another viaduct: slim, glistening in the moonlight, striding on confident pillars out of the ocean and across the land.

‘Just like the last,’ Lobsang said. ‘I mean, the same dimensions, apparently the same material. The night is very clear. I can trace it all the way to the ocean horizon, as straight as I can measure.’

‘Where are we?’

‘About the latitude of South Carolina. Some five hundred miles south of the New York viaduct. Took us around eighteen hours to get here.’

‘OK. So, Lobsang, if this is typical as you keep saying, if the whole world is girdled with these things – if they’re all around five hundred miles apart—’

‘There may be a couple of dozen of them. Of course the distribution may not be a simple spacing with distance, or latitude. We’ve no way of knowing, without a view from orbit.’

‘This is just as you anticipated, it seems, Lobsang. Global. I wonder how long it took them to build all this.’

‘We’ve no meaningful way to answer that question, Joshua. We don’t know how long they’ve been here, on this world. Or how fast they work. I suspect they’ve accelerated their progress since they encountered us. Getting it done before we can react. But that’s only a guess, for now.’

‘OK. But why , Lobsang? What’s it all for? A transport system? Rail lines? Are these aqueducts, like the Romans used to build?’

‘I doubt it’s anything so simple. I could make guesses, but it would not be constructive at this stage.’

Joshua studied him. His face, underlit by the tablets’ glow, was even harder to read than usual. ‘You sound subdued. Are even you in awe of what these beetles are building?’

There was no reply.

‘So, what next?’

Lobsang said thoughtfully, ‘We’ve come under no threat. The beetles must be aware of our movements; we passed over a work party, remember, on the New York viaduct. We are evidently irrelevant to them. And our findings cannot be lost, even if we do not return; I have already sent short-wave radio reports back to Agnes.’

‘You think we should go on. All the way to the equator?’

‘That’s what I suggest.’

‘Then let’s do it.’

The airship forged on, tracking the North American east coast, heading steadily south.

It was evening of this third day of the journey when they came upon the next viaduct, another five hundred miles or so south. This one spanned Florida, at about the latitude of Miami.

They reached the next viaduct south, another five hundred miles or so, about midday of the next day. It cut across the ocean itself with no land in sight, to north or south. Under a cloudy noon sky, the viaduct was difficult to make out against the grey shoulder of the ocean.

‘There’s no Mexico here,’ Joshua said, checking their position on a tablet map.

‘Very observant.’ Lobsang told Joshua that on this world – and on similar worlds in this band – Mesoamerica did not exist, as they knew it from the Datum. ‘Here, the Pacific breaks through into the Gulf of Mexico. And if you were to cross the Atlantic you’d find the Mediterranean flowing through the Middle East into the Arabian Sea. So there is a continuous waterway running all the way around the planet, at about this latitude. As a result the global ocean currents are different. Once, long ago, it was like this on the Datum; the palaeontologists call it the Tethys Sea. In fact some Long Earth geographers call these worlds the Tethys Belt.’

‘I guess that’s one reason the world’s warmer?’

‘Yes. And if they’ve straddled the whole world with a viaduct at this latitude, the beetles must have mostly encountered ocean, on their way around. An incredible feat of engineering.’