‘Why do you care about these places, Stan? I thought you despised religion. I remember when that preacher came around the beanstalk site going on about the Pope. You made him cry!’
‘I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they’re all but meaningless. I despise the division religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet … Don’t you see it, Rock? Look at this place – imagine building this with nothing but thirteenth-century tools. Not only that, they kept on building it, generation after generation, lives of toil devoted to a single purpose. And look at what they made! Why, it was as ambitious in its day as a Linsay beanstalk is now. In a place like this you can reject the answers those builders accepted, you can even reject the questions they asked, but you have to cherish the urge to ask such sublime questions in the first place.’
Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, Rocky sensed a huge distance between himself and his lifelong friend – a distance that only seemed to be widening as they grew up. Yet he knew he could never abandon Stan. It wasn’t just friendship, or loyalty, he was starting to realize. It was something more than that.
A kind of dazzling.
He blurted, ‘Stan, sometimes you scare me.’
Stan looked at him, genuinely puzzled. ‘Really? I don’t mean to. I’m sorry. You’re a good friend. But if you’re scared, why are you here?’
Because I can’t help it, was Rocky’s only answer. ‘Listen, I’m cold. Shall we get out of here?’
‘In a while.’ Stan stared up into the elegant spaces of the cathedral, his expression emptying, as if his mind was soaring up like a bird.
When they did step back home, they emerged into warm evening sunshine.
They strolled home; their families had neighbouring apartments in a rough dormitory development on the edge of the beanstalk facility. They reached Stan’s home first – but Martha asked Rocky to come in for a moment.
Inside, sitting with Martha, was a woman, in her thirties maybe, slim, dark, grave, dressed in a kind of business suit. Rocky had no idea who she was.
Stan, though, seemed to recognize her. ‘About time you showed up,’ he said.
Rocky was baffled.
Martha’s face was bleak. ‘Rocky, this woman is called Roberta Golding. She is a Next. She says Stan is too. He’s a Next, or they think so. And she’s come here to take him away from me.’
15
‘I ALWAYS KNEW he was special,’ said Martha Berg. ‘I suppose every mother thinks that. Even as a toddler, when he started to talk, he would gabble away.’
Roberta Golding nodded gravely. ‘We call that quicktalk. All Next children do this naturally.’
They were sitting around a table in the small living room of Martha’s house: Martha, this Roberta Golding woman, Stan – and Rocky, to whom the Next were not much more than a legend, a kind of horror story of the past, of smart kids the government had tried to lock up, or charismatic super-geniuses who had hijacked a US Navy twain and killed everybody. But this woman hadn’t come for Rocky.
Stan was just smiling.
Martha went on, ‘As he grew he was always running ahead of what his teachers planned for him. Fortunately that’s not much of a problem here, because the schooling is so informal. Mostly Jez and I worked it out between us—’
‘Jez, your husband.’
‘He’s aloft just now. I mean, up in the orbital anchor station of the tower. Takes days to get up and down, you know; even when work stops down here they’re stuck up there …’
Roberta said, ‘There’s no rush. We don’t have to make any decisions before you can speak to your husband.’
‘Well, we kept his schooling going until he was beyond the both of us, and off on his own. There are pretty good online resources here. We just let him loose on that.’
Roberta glanced at Stan. ‘I too grew up among humans, Stan. I know how frustrating it can be. How you have to keep yourself hidden.’
Martha said ruefully, ‘Oh, he didn’t do a lot of hiding.’
‘But if he had grown up among the Next,’ Roberta said softly, ‘he would have been learning with others like himself – and in our community, the Grange, we adults learn from the children in their discovery of the world.’ She eyed Stan. ‘There is a whole universe of ideas to explore. The legacy we inherited from humanity is only the beginning, for us.’
Rocky blurted now, ‘I hate the way you talk. We, you. Humanity, the Next. You look human enough to me. I’m sorry. I know it’s not my business.’
Martha touched his arm. ‘You’re his friend. Of course it’s your business.’
‘But, in fact, I am not human, as you are,’ Roberta said gently. ‘Genetically we diverge. The structure of my brain is different from yours.’ She smiled. ‘The neurologists at the US Navy base at Hawaii, where the most intensive study of Next children was performed before the establishment of the Grange, were able to determine that much.’
‘This Grange,’ Martha said nervously. ‘This is where you’re proposing to take Stan. Where is it?’
‘Far from here. Stepwise, I mean. We keep the location a secret. It was set up in the aftermath of an incident at a place called Happy Landings. A threat was made to destroy us. My kind. It could not have got us all, and the attempt was not made in the end; wiser heads prevailed. Nevertheless we heeded the warning. We have detached ourselves from the human world, for our safety, and yours.’
‘But you’re here now,’ Rocky said. ‘Acting undercover. Right? Pretending you’re something you’re not. Like the Arbiters.’ Who, Roberta had revealed, were Next agents too.
‘I can’t deny that. But we are here to study you, as well as help you. You are, after all, our precursors. And there has been no proper study of mankind.’
Martha said, a touch bitterly, ‘You mean no study aside from what we did ourselves. Which doesn’t count.’
‘That is so. And we do try to help you, in various ways.’
Rocky found that disturbing. He was only sixteen; he knew he was ignorant, naive. But he wondered just how much influence a covert organization of super-intelligent post-humans might be having, working across the worlds of mankind.
‘And,’ Roberta said, ‘we are looking for more of our own. Like you, Stan. Happy Landings was something of a forcing ground for the genetic development which led to our emergence: a peculiar community of humans and trolls thrown together, a product of the strange nature of the Long Earth. That was what created us. But now that genetic upgrading has spread through the rest of the population, and here and there, now and then, one of us will emerge among you.’
‘Us and you, again,’ Rocky said bitterly. ‘Stan’s a poppy growing in a weed patch, right?’
‘Not at all,’ she said blandly.
Martha said, ‘And you’re offering Stan a place with you in this – Grange?’
‘We’re offering him the chance to come visit us. See if he thinks he will be happy there.’
‘Suppose he isn’t,’ Rocky said. ‘Suppose he wants to come home. Will you let him?’
‘Of course. It’s not a prison, or—’
‘But he’ll know where you are. You said they already tried to blow you up once.’
Roberta said gently, ‘Stan could not expose us without exposing himself. He’s far too intelligent to do any such thing. Isn’t that true, Stan?’
Stan hadn’t spoken since first being introduced to Roberta. ‘Talking to you is interesting. Like a chess game, almost. We can both see our way to the end game.’