Marvin spoke first. ‘He’s obviously a candidate. The boy Stan Berg. Without even trying he was five, six, seven steps ahead of those construction workers in the game. With poker you need emotional intelligence, of course, you need to be able to read people. It was as if they were showing him their hands …’
He spoke in English, not quicktalk. They all did here. On Low Earths, the crowded worlds close to the Datum, there was always a chance of some kind of eavesdropping. Even in a property like this, apparently abandoned, there could be a low-power cam left running by some opportunistic peeping tom, for instance. It was frustrating to talk so slowly, as if they were spelling out words with a baby’s lettered wooden blocks. But they had to communicate somehow; they had to take a chance.
Gerd said now, ‘He has emotional intelligence, maybe, but not maturity. He put himself at risk by charging into that crowd of bozos around the kobold.’
Roberta took off her spectacles and rubbed tired eyes. She was over thirty years old now; even among the Next, she reflected, maybe age was necessary for true wisdom. She remembered very well her own adolescence. She’d been only a little younger than Stan when she’d travelled on a Chinese twain into the far Long Earth, with all its wonders and horrors. Unable to look away – unable not to understand – she had cried herself to sleep, most nights. ‘Are you mocking him, Gerd? Berg’s instinct, however uneducated, may be better than yours. What was it you called the others – “bozos”?’
Marvin folded his arms. ‘I reckon he was bluffing. Like in his poker. I think he knew he’d be saved.’
Melinda asked, ‘Who by? Us?’
Marvin said, ‘It’s possible. Maybe he’s guessed the true nature of the Arbiters – or at least has some unconscious suspicion about you.’ The Arbiters, a purely voluntary force recruited from amongst themselves by the Next, worked to keep the peace on the Low Earths, in the general absence of police support after the post-Yellowstone implosion of Datum America. ‘I sometimes think you’re a bit too obvious, you guys in your green uniforms, wandering around the dim-bulb worlds, sorting things out.’
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 …