Gerd snorted. ‘Whereas it’s morally acceptable for you to fleece them at gambling games?’

Marvin held up his hands. ‘I’m here to follow our consensus aims, just like you. Even if it doesn’t always seem wise to me. We went to the Grange in the first place as a refuge from these people, our mother culture, who put a bunch of Next kids in a high-tech concentration camp on Hawaii, and then considered bombing Happy Landings, our garden of Eden. Now here we are, out again, infiltrating their culture … Anyhow the dim-bulbs don’t get suspicious about gambling. They almost expect you to be smarter than they are, almost expect you to cheat. High finance is the same, by the way.’

Which of course was why Marvin himself was a good agent, a good contact for recruitment. Next-candidate types like Stan were often drawn to gambling for the rare opportunities it offered in dim-bulb worlds to use their superior intellects to make some money. When they came, Marvin was in a prime site to spot them.

Roberta nodded. ‘Your work’s understood, Marvin. And appreciated. But you know as well as I do that the debate is fluid. Some say we shouldn’t intervene at all, even in the most gross cases. And at the other extreme there is the Greening, the idea that we should work to restore humans to their wild state.’ Which some Next theorists argued was something like humanity’s Middle Stone Age, a pre-farming, pre-metals age of small wandering bands. All humans needed, some Next argued – all they needed to turn the Long Earth into a true Long Utopia – was a little gentle nudging from their intellectual superiors. Which, sceptics pointed out, when the cities broke up and the governments dissolved and humanity became a race of transient wanderers, would leave the Next in a position of permanent control …

Marvin folded his arms. ‘So if we’re unsure of our goals, why are we working on West 4 at all? Why the hell are we helping them build these big new space programmes? Some of them seem to be groping spontaneously, in fact, for something like the Greening. Look at the “combers”. And you have workers out there in Miami 4 protesting because they think the slow pace of the project is the fault of their inadequate bosses. We know it’s not. It’s not even anything economic, financial, political. We know the problem is that human industrial society is softening at the edges. The lifestyle they call “comber” is just too tempting; especially after an accident or some such, you get swathes of workers just downing tools and walking away to go pick fruit. People don’t have to work like this, and, increasingly, they just won’t. So why are we here?’

Roberta sighed. ‘Because these Low Earths still have large populations, after the Yellowstone emigrations. Declining, but still large. They must stay organized on large scales just to feed their own people. And because, for now, they can do this, and we can’t. We need the benefits too.’ The Next were still few in number, their direct technological capability limited. ‘We rely on high-tech goods of all kinds. Frankly, we’re parasitical on the Low Earth cultures for such goods. So, until we have a better solution of our own, we let this run – and encourage it, subtly.’

‘Hmm,’ said Marvin. ‘You know, they tell a joke, the dim-bulbs. “Doctor, doctor, my brother-in-law thinks he’s a tom cat.” “Well,” says the doc, “bring him in to see me and I’ll cure him.” “I can’t,” says the guy. “We need him to keep down the mice.” That’s what you’re saying about the dim-bulbs. These guys are crazy, a pathology. It would be kinder to let them all wander off, back into the forest where they came from. But we won’t let them be cured, because we need them to keep down the mice.’ He laughed softly.

Gerd said, ‘Well, we need to make a decision about this boy, Stan Berg. Whether or not he knows already what he is – and I have a feeling he does – we may need to get him out of here and to the Grange for his own protection.’

Roberta nodded. ‘I agree. You’re right. I’ll break cover and talk to Stan and his family when he returns. Where did he go, by the way?’

Marvin shrugged, and the Arbiters looked blank.

14

AMONG HIS OTHER attributes, Stan was a much better stepper than Rocky, and as usual Rocky had found the latest plummet, across three worlds in a matter of seconds, hard to take.

He had landed in Miami West 1 doubled over and retching. At least there was nobody around to see it, even if they were standing in the heart of a sprawling development of vast concrete shells. This was a virtual-reality theatre – evidently, he saw from the signs, a conservation project of the post-Yellowstone Museum of the Datum movement.

Stan rubbed his back. ‘You OK, buddy? Come on, let’s get out of the sun.’

He led Rocky a couple of blocks – they saw nobody around – and pushed open a swing door into a cavernous empty space. Rocky glimpsed sheer concrete walls, roughly finished.

Then, without warning, the virtual-reality simulation kicked in. Suddenly it was as if he was outdoors again: he was in some dismal snow-bound city, under a leaden sky. An artificial wind blew in from somewhere, and it was cold. Like Stan, he was dressed only in light stepwise-Earth Florida-summer’s-day gear; he was immediately shivering, and he wrapped his arms around his chest. ‘Where the hell’s this supposed to be? Some place on the Datum, right?’

‘Yep. In England. You’ve heard of England? Welcome to the volcano winter. Come on, something to show you. Not far.’ Stan hurried off through deserted streets.

Rocky, shivering like he’d break, had no choice but to follow.

They followed fading brown signs labelled ‘Medieval City’. An outer belt of modern development – modern for pre-Yellowstone anyhow, all concrete and glass and houses in neat little rows, all abandoned, some burned out – gave way to an inner core of narrower streets, older buildings of stone and brick, and, towering over it all, a tremendous spire, slim, very tall, elegant, glimpsed here and there through gaps in the rows of roofs. The buildings here were mostly terraces, crowding the roads like rows of ageing teeth, and they had evidently been rebuilt and reused, some still residential but others converted into boarding houses or cafés or tourist-trap shops – and all of them were now boarded up and abandoned. There was a sense of great age, of generations having lived and died here, reworking the building stock over and over. It was all utterly alien to Rocky. Miami West 4, the community he’d grown up in, had few buildings older than he was.

They came into a kind of square, of ice-bound mud that might once have been grass-covered. And there before them, standing alone, topped by that great spire, was a cathedral, huge, its proportions distorted by their perspective from the ground – like a spaceship of stone, Rocky thought, that had just landed here.

Stan led him forward confidently. Set in a wall of elaborately carved stone was a heavy wooden door, which Stan pushed open; it was evidently unlocked. And then they were inside the cathedral. There was an immediate hush, a sense of even deeper age. Rocky had never been in such a building before in his life.

They walked down the cross-shaped building’s long axis. Pillars of stone stood in tall rows, supporting arches which in turn held up a fantastically ornate roof. Rocky saw that the building itself was intact, more or less – even the great stained-glass windows were still complete – but the contents had been more or less stripped, leaving the long stone floor bare. Maybe the benches for the congregations that must once have gathered here had been taken for firewood. The whole thing must be built of nothing but stone and wood, Rocky thought, but it looked light as air.

Stan asked, ‘You understand this is all a recent capture?’