Stella and Marvin exchanged a look. ‘It is difficult to explain without the mathematics,’ Stella said.
Joshua said, ‘I think they’re saying that whoever does this, whoever saves the Long Earth, will be laying down their life.’
There was a shocked silence.
Then George stepped forward. ‘We asked you here to help us, and now we must trust you. And we will. What can we do to assist you?’
Stella glanced at Joshua. ‘First of all – could you please persuade Sally Linsay to talk to us?’
48
AS IT TURNED out, as Rocky eventually came to figure it, by the time the Next came to ‘collect’ him, Stan had started to whip up so much trouble at Miami West 4 that there were all kinds of people who would have been glad to see the back of him regardless.
On the very day the Next came for him, in fact, Stan was preaching. Then again, most days he was preaching now, since coming back from the Grange with a head full of new ideas.
In the heavy afternoon sunlight of a late spring day, in this footprint of Miami – at the foot of the space elevator, an eggshell-blue thread that connected Earth to sky – Stan sat on the roof of a low concrete bunker and looked out over his fellow stalk jacks, a hundred or so of them gathered before him. And the crowd was in turn being surveyed by uniformed state cops, company security guys, and presumably by other agencies undercover. Ready for the trouble which seemed to be attracted to Stan.
And Stan Berg said, ‘Apprehend. Be humble in the face of the universe. Do good. Eleven words. Three rules. There endeth the sermon for the day, unless you want to hear a few lame gags …’ Laughter.
Even Rocky, at the back of the group, could hear him clearly. Aged just nineteen, Stan had developed a way of projecting his voice.
Rocky stood here with three women. Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who had escorted them to the Grange. Melinda Bennett, the young Arbiter, who had revealed herself to Rocky as a Next on his return, living quietly among ‘ordinary’ people, just as quietly intervening to help keep the peace – or, if you listened to Stan, to anaesthetize mankind into passivity. And Martha, Stan’s mother, listening to her son preaching, who quite clearly did not want to be here, and yet just as clearly could not bear to be anywhere else.
This was a meal break before the evening shift, and Stan had attracted a good crowd. Stan himself looked totally at ease as he took a bite of his sandwich, and a sip of alcohol-free beer. He said now, ‘You know, I never did like numbers much.’
That raised a chuckle from his fellow workers, who knew Stan was one of the brightest in the pool and had forever been turning down training chances in favour of staying with these people, the stalk jacks, his friends – friends who were increasingly his followers.
‘Oh, I was good at the numbers. Wouldn’t deny that. I could count to three before I was, well, three.’ He pulled a face. ‘Which confused me. But round about then I figured that I mostly didn’t need the numbers that go much beyond three. There was only one of me, two of my parents, together we made three.’ He looked down at his lunch. ‘I got three sandwiches here, three beers. I guess I’ll be needing the john three times during the shift.’ He looked around with a grin. ‘And I’ve been figuring, if I was to ask somebody smart, I mean really smart, what life was all about – how I was to live it – I think I’d measure that smartness, not by how many words he or she spouted, not by how many books he or she had written—’
He picked up a book now from his pile of stuff. Rocky recognized a battered old copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. Stan threw it out into the crowd, and people jumped to grab it.
‘No,’ Stan said, ‘I’d think they were smarter the more they boiled down their wisdom. The closer they got to the number three – to three simple rules of thumb, if you like. Who needs more than three? Such as.’ He held up his left thumb. ‘Rule of the First Thumb. Apprehend. Which is a nice word if you roll it around your mouth. Apprehend.
‘It doesn’t just mean “understand”, although it includes that meaning, fully. It means you should face the truth of the world – not let yourself be fooled by how you’d like it to be. You should try to be fully aware of the richness of reality, of the mixed-up complexity of all the processes going right back to the birth of the stars that have produced you and the world you live in, and this very moment …
‘And you need to apprehend other people too, as best you can.’ He gazed out at upturned faces. ‘Even those close to you. Especially those close to you. “You cannot love what you do not know.” That’s from an old religious teacher, some saint or other. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’
‘I grok you!’ somebody called, to general laughter.
Stan grinned back. ‘That’s catchier. And here’s another way of saying this. Be here now. Which is the title of an Oasis album.’
One of the senior engineers, an elderly British guy, raised a solitary whoop in response. ‘Gone but not forgotten, Stan!’
‘Be here now. If you have a god, then consider that every moment you’re alive and aware in this glorious world is a moment of awareness of that god – and to live in that moment is the only way you can be aware of your god …’
Melinda murmured, ‘Now he almost sounds like Celandine.’
Martha said fiercely, ‘But there’s also some Spinoza in there, I think. For all you brainiacs dismiss the work of mere humans. Also the rationalist atheists who said our ethics must be drawn from human experience … I’ve tried to study this stuff. So I could find ways to talk to my son. Did you see who caught the book, by the way?’
Rocky had. ‘Mo Morris.’ One of the innermost group Stan called his ‘buddies’, and some of the jealous outsiders referred to as ‘superfans’ – if not by some more pejorative term – and who Martha called the ‘misfits’. Mostly young, mostly male, they were odd, needy characters, at least in Martha’s view, for whom Stan’s sudden charisma, revealed when he got back from the Grange, filled a hole in their lives they’d barely even known existed. Now here they were, lapping up every word, recording Stan on their phones and tablets, or just slavishly writing down every word he uttered, every lame joke. Certainly none of them had hung around with Stan before his secret journey. They were a growing flock from which Rocky, his oldest friend, the only one around him now aside from his mother who’d really known him before, was increasingly excluded.
And yet Rocky couldn’t walk away, any more than Martha could. For Rocky feared for Stan’s safety.
Stan was still talking. ‘And you know what I’d expect this smart person to say to me next?’ He stuck up the thumb on his right hand now. ‘The Rule of the Second Thumb. Be humble in the face of the universe. Of course if they were that humble they wouldn’t be laying down the law in the first place. Be humble. You got to be aware of your limits, right?’ He glanced up at the space elevator. ‘We all have meaningful jobs on this thing. But you do what you can do. Unless you can solve fourth-order differential equations you ain’t going to be much help in the design office, are you?’
‘I bet you could solve them, Stan,’ called up one of the buddies.
Stan shrugged. ‘Not beyond third-order. I told you I can only count up to three.’
Laughter.
‘Be humble. Some of you are paramedics, first responders. The first thing they teach any medic is do no harm. Isn’t that right? Help if you can, but at least don’t make things worse in your ignorance. But to accept that limit you need to know your ignorance. Here we are building this mighty monument. We know what it’s designed to do, we’ve all seen the projections and the business models: the fruits of the sky brought down to this Earth. But none of us knows what effects it’s going to have, not in the short, medium or long term. We live in a reality that’s not just complicated, it’s chaotic. Unstable. So, be humble in the face of the universe. Know the limits of what you can achieve, what you can know. And in a chaotic universe, at least don’t snafu stuff even more than it already is snafued …’ He raised an arm and mimed flicking his middle finger at the cable. ‘You know, I have this fantasy that if I touch this big guitar string just right I could set up this huge oscillation … That’s one small pluck for a man, one giant twang for mankind—’ Hastily he stuck his hand in his pocket. ‘Best not take the chance!’