Terry Pratchett - The Long Utopia

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.’

He looked inside himself. ‘After all we’ve been through together, I don’t know what I feel.’

‘Then stop picking the scab,’ she said sternly.

‘It seems like yesterday when we first met.’

‘When I found you .’

‘In our flying penis, as you called our airship. In the High Meggers. You and your pet dinosaurs basking in the sun.’

‘Ancient history.’

‘We had lunch. Fresh-caught oysters on an open fire, on that distant beach.’

‘I guess I’m heading for another kind of beach now, Joshua.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Still alive, as far as I know. Made a fortune out of his patents on the beanstalk tech we brought back from Mars.’

Joshua frowned. ‘I meant, why isn’t he here? Does he know ? About this, about you? Did you try to contact him?’

She shrugged. ‘He’ll know all about it. He always did know everything. If he wanted to be here, he would be.’

‘But did you try—’

‘Leave it, Joshua. My business. As for you, remember me to Helen. That little mouse.’

‘She was always wary of you, you know.’

‘Of course she was. To her, I was a symbol of the side of you she could never reach, and she knew it. She was good for you, Joshua. But we make our own choices.’

‘I guess that’s true. But I take it that right now you have no choice—’

‘Not with this. I never did have. Not from the first moment I heard about the problems on this world.’

‘And you brought Lobsang here. What did you hear? How?’

But Sally, who had always been immersed in her own networks of information spanning the Long Earth, had never answered questions like that, and didn’t now.

‘Anyhow, because of that, I’m going to lose you,’ he said gently.

She grinned. ‘Don’t go soft on me now, Valienté.’

‘Sally—’

‘Be seeing you.’

And she disappeared, vanishing stepwise, as precociously and abruptly as she had always done, from their very first meeting on the beach with the oysters and the dinosaurs.

IN THE RUINS of New Springfield, when the Cowley and its passengers had stepped away at last, the three left behind stood alone.

Sally took a deep breath. ‘It’s amazing how different a world feels when you’re alone in it. Refreshing.’

Lobsang – the replicant formerly known as George Abrahams – grunted. ‘You’re turning into Joshua.’

‘I’ll take that as an insult.’

‘Well, I think it’s a relief,’ said Stan Berg. ‘That it’s done, at last. The goodbyes. Now we can get on with the job.’ His voice was flat, his face expressionless.

Sally exchanged a glance with Lobsang. Suddenly this man, this boy – this super-intellect of the Next, this prophet, this mother’s son – seemed very young indeed. Young and scared. And he had a right to be, Sally thought. Yet, despite his youth, he had taken on this responsibility, and faced the tears of his mother, because he had seen the danger, presumably, more clearly than any of them. That was the curse of Next intelligence: you had no comforting delusions.

She said, ‘Come on. Let’s get done what we stayed here to do. Where shall we go? I guess we could be anywhere, on this broken planet.’

Stan looked around. ‘Top of the hill?’

Lobsang smiled. ‘Where my home is, or was, what’s left of it. Suits me, so long as we don’t get blown off.’

The climb up Manning Hill wasn’t steep, but difficult in a wind that hit them harder the more exposed they were. At the summit, Sally could see the foundations of the Abrahams house, the pits they had dug for sewage and storage, the lines of postholes outlining abandoned fields. But little was left of the farmstead but scattered debris, wind-smashed, the labour of years erased.

Looking down from here, Sally could still see the basic layout of the landscape Lobsang and Agnes had lived in, the forest, the creek that had drawn the settlers to this place. But now the creek was brown, turbid with washed-down mud, and the forest was dying back, scarred by fires, battered by the wind, wrecked by the touchdown of twisters. Hundred-year-old trunks lay scattered like spilled matchsticks.

And already the sun was setting behind the racing clouds, another of this world’s truncated days coming to an end.

She grabbed her companions’ hands firmly. The three of them stood close together, holding hands in a ring, face to face on this desolate hill, resisting the gusty wind. They had to shout to make themselves heard.

Lobsang said, ‘ When shall we three meet again? ’

Sally grinned. ‘ In thunder, lightning, or in rain? ’

‘ When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won …’ Stan blinked a squall of rain out of his eyes. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We had good schools in Miami West 4. It wasn’t all stalk jack engineering.’

‘Well, the quote’s apt given the weather,’ Lobsang said. ‘And it is a battle. A battle we already lost. But maybe we can win the war, the war for the Long Earth, with this single strike.’ He looked in their faces. ‘Just so we’re all on the same song sheet: the projections of the spin-up have been uncertain for a while. In the last few days the rate of energy increase has gone super-exponential. Hard to model, to predict. We told our families we might have weeks left. But that was for their comfort, yes?’

Stan nodded. ‘I know. What’s the latest guess?’

‘Not weeks. Hours . A couple of local days, if we’re lucky.’

‘It makes no difference,’ Stan said, with an authority that belied his years. ‘But we need to get the Cauterizing done before we run out of time.’

Sally squeezed his hand harder. ‘So how do we do it, Lobsang?’

‘Stella Welch and I have gone through it … Let’s be clear where we are. This world has become, presumably by some higher-dimensional accident, a point of intersection of our Long Earth, our chain of worlds, with another chain. Another Long world. A chain to which the world we call the Planetarium belongs.’

Stan said, ‘Like two necklaces crossing. Tangling up.’

‘That’s it. Visualize that. It’s important that you visualize … Step along one axis, East or West, and you follow the track of the Long Earth. Step another way, North or South, and you follow the Long Planetarium, as the beetles seem to have done. So the connectivity of the Long Earth is unusual here. Broken. What we want to do now is change that connectivity, make it the way we want it. Visualize it. Imagine what you’re going to do, Stan …’