The Long Utopia, Page 3

  Pioneers tended to have their children young; the sooner you raised a new crop of willing workers the better. But the numerous children of New Springfield, growing up in a world utterly unlike their parents’, had quickly learned independence of mind, and had rebelled. Most of the youngsters, and a good number of their parents, had given up and walked off into the green. The will to maintain the township had kind of dissolved away – indeed it had only lasted one generation.

  Nowadays the Irwins and the other family groups didn’t really have permanent residences at all. Instead they had a kind of cycle of living places, which you’d visit according to the fruits of the gentle seasons, and keep clear of fresh brush with a little burning, and repair last year’s lean-tos and hearths. So they’d climb Manning Hill on one particular world a couple of steps East in the spring months, when the squirrel-moles came bursting out of the ground to choose new queens and found new burrows, and were easy to trap. Or, in the fall, they’d go to Soulsby Creek four steps further West where the annual spawning run of the local salmon was particularly rich. Nikos had grown up with all this, and knew no different.

  As for the old township itself, meanwhile, as they grew old and weary a lot of the founders had gone back to the Datum. A few disappointed pioneers had clung on as best they could, and their relatives had kept an eye on these ageing heroes. Nikos’s mother told a wistful story of how she used to hear one old lady play that piano of an evening, and Chopin waltzes would waft out into the silence of the world forest, music written down in a century long gone and in a world very far from here, and sometimes picked up by responsive choruses of forest trolls. But the piano lost its tuning, and there came a day when the music ceased altogether, and now nobody played the piano any more.

  Even after it had been wholly abandoned, though, Nikos’s group worked together to keep the New Springfield clearing open. It had some uses. Everybody needed a Stepper box, and for that you needed potatoes, and potatoes needed cultivating, so that was something useful to do with the remains of the founders’ farms. It had taken somebody a lot of effort to build the forge beside the Poulson place, and that was kept functional; you couldn’t carry iron across worlds, and preserving the craft of iron-working seemed another good idea. Some of the animals the founders had brought here – chickens and goats and pigs and even sheep – had survived, and bred. Every so often you’d be surprised by a wild descendant of those first porcine colonists bursting out of the undergrowth before you.

  And this one house in particular, the old Poulson place, sturdier than the rest, had with time assumed a new role. It had become the swap house, as everybody called it, a place where you could dump and exchange stuff of all kinds.

  Which was why Nikos was here today.

  He walked cautiously across the clearing, towards the Poulson place.

  With one hand on the sturdy bronze knife he carried on his left hip, the other on the Stepper box on his right, he was very aware of his surroundings. He had no real fear of the local wildlife. As far as wild critters went there were only three hazards in the forest: the ant swarms, the big birds, and the crocs. Well, he was too far from water for the crocs, and the big birds were ferocious but were used to chasing little forest furballs and were heavy and clumsy and slow-moving as a result, and if there was an ant swarm around he’d hear it coming long before it came sloshing over the ground like some gruesome corroding liquid, destroying everything in its path. Also the forest trolls would almost certainly sing out any danger, in time for Nikos to step out of its way. Almost certainly. Nikos had seen for himself one unwary kid get caught by a big bird, and it had been a terrible sight, and so you kept an eye out because of that weasel word almost.

  No, the reason Nikos was so cautious was because, among the kids at least, there were stories about this particular house. Legends, if you liked. Legends about things that lived in there.

  Oh, not just scavenging furballs and such. And not just the familiar monsters of the forest. Something worse yet. An elf, maybe, trapped in there, a Long Earth nasty, broken and bent and old but still vicious and just waiting to feed on unwary children. Or maybe, went one variation of this, it was the ghost of one of those very children, waiting to take revenge on those who had forced him or her to go in here in the first place . . .

  Of course it made no sense. Nikos was old enough to see the flaws in the logic – if the Poulson house was haunted, why would the adults be using it as a store? – yet he was still enough of a little kid to be scared. Well, stories or not, he wasn’t going back without what he’d been sent to get, that was for sure, or the mockery of his buddies would be worse than anything any monster could do to him.

  As he reached the porch, Rio sniffed the air, yelped, and went running out of sight around the corner of the house, maybe on the trail of some unwary furball. Nikos paid the dog no attention.

  He opened a creaking, unlocked door, pushed his way inside and looked around. Only a little daylight was able to struggle through the green film that was slowly covering the windows. He had a wind-up flashlight that he dug out of his pocket now, so as to see better in the murk. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled with unease. He was used to tepees and lean-tos; never mind ghost legends, it was quite alien for him just to walk into a box of wood, all closed up. Still, he walked deeper inside, treading cautiously.

  One main room dominated much of the house. He knew that was how these houses had been built: you started with one big space where the whole growing family lived and ate and slept, and added on others when you could, such as a kitchen, bedrooms, store rooms – but this house, like most of the others, hadn’t got that far. He could recognize stuff from the times he’d been here before, under the supervision of his father: the big old table standing in the corner, the hearth under a half-finished chimney stack, the floor covered with a scattering of rugs woven from reeds from the creek and coloured with dyes from local vegetables.

  But the room was cluttered with junk, dusty old debris, heaped on the floor and the table and piled against the walls. Yet it wasn’t junk, not quite. The people of the forest were always short of stuff, because everything they had was either brought from the Datum Earth or the Low Earths, or they had to make it themselves, and either way cost a lot of effort. So if something broke, a bow or a bronze machete or a digging stick, and you couldn’t be troubled to fix it, you dumped it here in the swap house, the theory being that somebody else might make use of it, or at least bits of it – the bronze for melting down, a busted bow as a trainer for a little kid. There was a useful store of bits of wire and relays and coil formers, the kind of stuff you needed to make or repair a Stepper box or a ham radio. There was even a heap of fancy electronic goods from the Datum: phones and tablets, all black and inert since their batteries or solar cells had finally failed, their inner parts too fine and fiddly to be reusable. Even these were sometimes taken away to be worn as jewellery, or as shiny gifts for the forest trolls.

  And there were always clothes, especially children’s clothes: underwear and pants and shirts and sweaters and socks and shoes, much of it brought from the Low Earths, some made here. The adult stuff was generally too worn out to be useful, but Nikos picked out a few colourful scraps for the latest quilted blanket his mother was making; even rough shreds could be used to pack bedding and the like. The kids’ stuff, though, was often barely used before the child in question grew out of it. The people of New Springfield were a mobile, nomadic people, and carried little with them. They certainly weren’t going to carry around baby shoes for twenty years, on the off chance of some grandchild coming along some day to wear them for a couple of months. And it was baby shoes that Nikos was particularly looking for today, for the benefit of Angie Clayton’s unborn.

  After some rummaging he found a pair of beautiful little moccasins sewn from the scraped hide of some unfortunate furball, shoes that sat on the palm of his hand like toys.

  That was when he heard Rio yelp, and a sound like wood cracking, and a ru
sh like a heavy mass falling into a hole.

  4

  NIKOS DASHED OUTSIDE and ran around the house, the way his dog had gone. ‘Rio! Rio!’

  At the back of the house, facing uncleared jungle, a row of poles had been driven into the ground, a half-finished stockade, intended to keep sheep in and big birds out. Nikos pushed his way through the tea plants and saplings that choked the once-cleared space between house and stockade – and he almost fell into a hole in the ground.

  He took a cautious step back and peered down. The hole was maybe six feet across, and had been covered by rough-cut planks of wood that had evidently softened, made rotten by time. He could see from the remaining planks that they had been buried under soil, with a heaping of forest mulch on top of that. There were even a few hardy ferns sprouting in that skim of earth. But one of the planks had broken now, and fallen into the hole, revealing a deep black space.

  Nikos scratched his head. The whole thing was kind of puzzling. Was this a cellar? It could be. As well as a place to store food and other stuff, a cellar was a sensible precaution against attack by bandits and others with nefarious purposes. If you had a Stepper box no wall could keep you out, after all; you just needed to step sideways into a world where that wall didn’t exist, walk through the location of the wall, and step back again . . . Nobody could step into a cellar, however. Not with the same location in neighbouring worlds blocked off by soil and bedrock and tree roots. There were even shallow cellars under some of Nikos’s family’s larger, better established encampments, dotted stepwise across the worlds.

  Yes, you’d expect a house like this to have a cellar, or at least the beginnings of one. But why plank it over?

  And while all this crud on top of the planks might have just gathered there with the years, it looked like the hole had been deliberately concealed. Why hide it? Was it actually some kind of trap, rather than a cellar? But a trap for what? Only a big bird or a croc, or a big dog like Rio, or a human, would have been heavy enough to smash through those planks – and maybe not at all, back when the planks weren’t so far-gone rotten as they were now.

  None of this mattered. Rio was missing.

  He hesitated, there in the unshaded sunshine. Enclosure underground would be even worse than in the Poulson house, because his primary defence, stepping out of any danger, wouldn’t be available to him. He nearly backed away. But Rio . . . Carried all the way from Datum Earth as a pup by a trader, she was a Bernese mountain dog, bred, it was said, to pull carts laden with cheese. She was strong, with good lungs, but slow.

  She was Nikos’s dog. If he had to climb down into this hole he would.

  He got down on his hands and knees, cautiously, and peered into the hole, through the broken plank. All he saw was darkness, even when he shone in his flashlight.

  ‘Rio!’

  At first he heard nothing at all, not even an echo. Then came a bark, undoubtedly Rio’s, from out of the hole – but it sounded remarkably far off – not like it was from a dog trapped just a few feet down. ‘Rio! Rio! . . .’

  And then he heard another sound. A kind of scraping, almost a whispering, like some huge insect. It seemed to move away, as if burrowing deeper down. All the legends and scare stories in his head came bubbling back to the surface. Again, he almost backed off. But his dog was down there.

  Feverishly he began to pull away the remaining planks, carelessly tipping dirt into the hole. ‘Rio! Here, girl! Rio! . . .’

  The pit he revealed was only maybe eight feet deep, crudely cut into loose-packed earth. He dangled over the edge, made sure he could scramble back up the sides before committing himself, then he dropped down to the bottom.

  He looked around. If this had been intended to be a cellar it wasn’t much of one, the walls bare earth, the floor still showing the spade marks left by the original digger and not smoothed off. It was just a hole in the ground, hastily cut and more hastily concealed. And there was no sign of his dog.

  It was pretty clear where Rio had gone, though. There was a breach in one wall, down near the floor.

  Making sure he had his pocket knife to hand, Nikos got down on hands and knees, and found himself looking into a kind of tunnel in the earth. It wasn’t too wide, just a few feet, but it was a lot more smoothly cut than the aborted cellar, with a circular profile and smooth walls. And, he saw, sweeping his flashlight, it sloped down at a fairly steep angle. Down into darkness, beyond the reach of his light. What could have made this? Some kind of burrowing animal, maybe? There were furballs that lived underground, and his mind conjured up a vision of a squirrel-mole the size of a human, with claws on its big digging paws the size of spades. It would be like a kobold, he thought, a human-sized mole-like humanoid that sometimes came by, trying to trade. But he remembered that peculiar rustling, that whispering, scraping noise, like no sound a furball would make, or even a kobold.

  Then, in the furthest distance, he heard another bark, a frightened yelp.

  He let instinct take over. ‘Coming, girl! Just you wait for Nikos!’

  He took his flashlight in his mouth, entered the tunnel on all fours, and began to crawl down the slope. Under his hands and knees there was only dirt, smoothed over and close-packed. Behind him the disc of daylight receded, while ahead of him the light of the flash showed another opening at the end of the tunnel, a neat circle that let out into a still deeper dark. Being shut up in this tunnel was scary, and the Stepper box at his belt made it awkward to move. He’d have to back up to get out of here, for he’d have trouble turning round. But he pushed on.

  He travelled maybe twenty feet, he figured, a steady descent down into the dark.

  Then the slanting shaft ended in an opening to a much larger chamber. Still on his hands and knees, he cautiously peered out, waving his light. His flash picked up a roof and floor, both smoothly worked, maybe ten feet apart, and pillars, like remnants of cutaway dirt or bedrock, regularly placed. He couldn’t see any walls, to either side or ahead; his flash wouldn’t reach that far. He was evidently entering a much more expansive space, wide and deep.

  So much for his ideas about squirrel-moles. What the hell was all this?

  It reminded him of what he’d read, in his mother’s irregular school classes, about mining back on the Low Earths. He knew there was a seam of iron ore around here that the founders had plundered when the Poulsons had built their forge – the rich seam, unique to this particular world, was one reason they’d settled here. But he’d seen the size of that home-built forge, and the handfuls of nails and such they’d made, the few horseshoes for the exotic-sounding animals they’d meant to import here some day but had never gotten around to (Nikos had never seen a horse). They could never have dug all this out in such a short time, and there would have been no need anyhow. But if not them—

  The face appeared in front of him.

  Face: that was one word for it, a mask that was vaguely the shape of a human face, one side covered by silvery metal, the other even worse, sculpted out of what looked like the black shiny stuff God made beetles out of, as his father might have said. But it was a definite face, mounted on a tiny-looking head that tilted on a narrow neck.

  It almost looked curious. Inspecting him, that odd head tilting. Curious. Alive!

  The delayed shock hit him. He screamed, and the noise echoed loudly from that big open chamber beyond. He tried to back up, but he lost his hold on the tunnel’s sloping floor, and he slid forward, and tumbled out of the shaft—

  Right into the arms of the silver-beetle creature. Arms? Did it have arms? He felt cold metal under his back, his legs. He yelled and struggled, and was released.

  He hit the ground, a drop of only a few feet, but it knocked the wind out of him, and he dropped his flashlight. He rolled to his feet quickly, but in the dark, with the fallen flash giving only a sliver of light, he felt turned around, disoriented.

  He saw the beetle thing roll on to its belly and scuttle away, perhaps as alarmed as he was. It looked human-sized, but l
ike a beetle or a locust in its shape and the way it moved and in the shiny black hardness of its body, its multiple limbs.

  And he saw, he heard, more beetle creatures approach. He grabbed the flashlight off the floor and swung it around.

  They were coming at him from all sides, crawling along the ground, like an ant swarm but much larger, more monstrous, and the way those shiny black carapaces were laced with metal, stuff that had been made, was somehow even more horrific. When he pointed the light at one it flinched back as if dazzled, but from every other direction they kept on approaching. And when they got close they started rearing up, and he saw soft bellies exposed, with pale grey pods clinging to greenish flesh, like blisters.

  Then one of them rose up right before him. He saw a half-face silver mask just like the first he’d encountered – maybe it actually was the first, he had no way of distinguishing them one from another – and a kind of tentacle, thread-like, silvery, reached out towards him.

  He tried to stay still. But when the pseudopod touched him, cold metal on warm flesh, Nikos’s nerve broke.

  He ran forward, yelling, waving his flashlight, pushing through rustling bodies that tipped and scrambled to get out of his way. He didn’t get very far before he tripped over something and fell on to a hard, compacted floor. Again he dropped the flash, and he had moments of panic in the shifting shadows of the dark before he got it back, moments when he could hear them shifting and whispering and scraping all around him. He had no idea which way the wall was, and the shaft he’d emerged from. Panic rose again, choking him.