The Long Utopia (7 page)

But Ben was here, tugging at her hand, pulling her back into his life. ‘Ag-ness?’

She forced a smile. ‘Hello, honey. Come on, shall we go have some lunch and meet some new friends?’

‘Lunch!’

A
COUPLE OF
days later, with Sally and the airship long gone, the family were invited to a barn dance. This was to be held in an open space down by the creek that wound its way around the hill where their gondola sat – and, as decided at the last minute, a couple of steps East, as the weather was a little better there that evening. Of course they would have accepted even if it hadn’t turned out that the event was being mounted in their honour.

Somewhat nervously, Agnes got herself ready for the evening. Before the journey out here, before they’d been discharged from the Black Corporation laboratories for the last time, Agnes had had her ambulant body set to look as if she was around her middle fifties: a few years younger, apparently, than Lobsang. And a mere forty years or so younger than her calendar age . . . Well, fifties was an age she’d lived through once already; she knew how to make the best of her greying hair, and she’d packed a decent gingham dress that she knew would suit her on the night. Lobsang meanwhile wore a loud checked shirt, jeans and cowboy boots – and little Ben was kitted out in a scale model of exactly the same gear. The outfit wasn’t going to last, he’d grow out of it in a few months, but Sally had suggested packing it to make a first impression on just such an occasion as this.

So, prepared, they joined their neighbours.

The barn dance turned out to be just what Agnes would have expected. This field by the stream, roughly cleared and fenced off,
was evidently intended for sheep, and Agnes saw a small flock in a pen not far away. Now, in the gathering twilight, the open space was lit by burning brands that gave off a tar-like smell. There was a ribald caller with a couple of fiddlers standing on crates pumping out the music, and the people, maybe fifty in all, men, women and kids, lined up and whirled around. It was a scene Agnes imagined you could have seen anywhere in rural America back on the Datum for decades, if not centuries. The difference here was the in-case-of-emergency Stepper boxes that bounced on people’s hips as they danced.

There was a bar at one end of the field, where you could fill up on the juice of some unidentifiable citrus, or water, or on quite good home-brew beer. There were even a few bottles of whisky. A barbecue sizzled and popped, but the food on the grill was mostly unfamiliar to Agnes: strips of red meat, presumably from the little local mammals they called ‘furballs’, and one monster of a drumstick that must have come from one of the local ‘big birds’, there more for show than for eating – it would probably take all night to cook a joint the size of a whole turkey. And there were oat-flour cookies, and slices of pumpkin. A few dogs ran around yapping, or begging for food scraps. Shi-mi, naturally enough, was nowhere to be seen.

Soon they were grabbed by their new neighbours and pulled into the dance.

Agnes had been to enough dances in her misspent youth to have the general idea, but she found herself having to learn new steps rapidly as she went along. Lobsang seemed to be struggling more than she was, and once even tripped over his feet and landed on the deck, only to be picked up again by his neighbours, laughing.

In the heat, noise and laughter, Agnes quickly tired – or rather, emotionless software in her gel-filled head ran programs to simulate tiredness, triggered fake sweat glands, and made her mechanical lungs pump harder at the warm air. She tried to embrace
the feeling, and put aside the fact that she was basically living out a lie before these evidently good people.

When she took a break, Lobsang joined her by the rough-and-ready bar. He said, sipping a whisky, ‘I will always regret that I now have conscious control over my degree of drunkenness. And we could have been better prepared for this. We spent
nine years
training to be pioneers. We should have just downloaded a barn-dancing application.’

Agnes snorted. ‘Where’s the fun in that? Or the authenticity? You’re a city boy come to learn the ways of the country, Lob—
George.
Get used to it. Enjoy.’

‘Yes, but—’ He was interrupted, grabbed at the elbows by two burly middle-aged women who hauled him back into the line.

A smiling woman, dark, forty-ish, approached Agnes with a fresh cup of lemonade. ‘Sorry about that. We always seem to be short of men at these dances, and Bella and Meg can be a little boisterous when there’s fresh meat around. Like big birds on the prowl.’

‘Fresh meat? George will be flattered. Nothing fresh about us, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that; you’re making a fine impression.’ She stuck out her hand to shake. ‘I am Marina Irwin. My husband Oliver is out there somewhere.’

‘Irwin. Oh, it’s your boy who’s babysitting for us tonight. Nikos?’

‘That’s right. For a suitable fee, I’m sure. Quite the capitalist, my Nikos, for a twelve-year-old boy who’s grown up out in the green.’

‘It’s kind of him to miss the dance for us.’

‘Well, it was a sacrifice for him. But give him another year and we won’t be able to prise him away from the girls . . .’

Maybe, Agnes thought doubtfully. She had met rather a lot of twelve-year-old boys during her years in the Home in Madison, and Nikos struck her immediately as a decent enough kid –
but a kid with a secret
, a big one, an observation that had nagged at her since she’d met him.

Marina was still talking. ‘. . . I wouldn’t object if you gave him some work on your farmstead, by the way. It would be good for him to have some experience of that. Not many of us farm any more.’

Agnes pointed. ‘Sheep over there.’

‘Sure. We keep sheep mostly for the wool,’ and she smoothed her own dress, which, Agnes saw in the uncertain light, was knitted, and tinted a pleasant apple-green, presumably by some vegetable dye. ‘All you get from the local furballs – the forest animals – are scraps of skin. The feathers from the big birds are more useful, actually.’ Her voice had a pleasant lilt, Mediterranean, perhaps Greek, Agnes thought. ‘We do raise some crops – mostly potatoes, for the Stepper boxes. And for emergency food reserves, though this world is so clement we rarely need to dig into those.’ Though, even as she said that, the breeze picked up again, and Marina pushed loose hair from her forehead with a puzzled frown. She went on, ‘The first people here intended to go in for farming – they cleared the forest, marked out fields, the works. The old Barrow place up on Manning Hill, that you’ve taken over? That was one of them, as you’ll have guessed. And the old Poulson house is another – you know, the swap house, our local haunted house! My Nikos spends half his life in there, I think it’s a kind of clubhouse for him and his buddies. He’ll grow out of that.’

Agnes prompted, ‘But the farming didn’t stick.’

‘No. Now there’s a bunch of us spread out over the stepwise worlds. We do have homes, you see, but they’re scattered around, seasonal. We work together to maintain the farms for the sheep, the potatoes, a few chickens and such. And we have a kind of rota for when to meet up, for events like this. The rest of the time we just wander. We’re not combers, by the way! Oliver takes offence if you call him that.’

‘I get it. Just an easier life than farming.’

‘Well, that’s the idea. These worlds are so rich, why do our kids need to break their backs behind a plough? But,’ she said hastily,
‘what we choose isn’t for everybody. And it’s not to say you won’t make a go of your farm, if that’s what you want. To each his own.’

‘That’s a good philosophy.’

‘I mean, you’ll fit right in. If you do grow wheat and stuff we’ll be happy to trade for it.’ Marina sipped her lemonade. ‘And that little boy of yours looks like he’ll grow up big and strong, like his . . . father?’

Agnes suppressed a smile; the probe couldn’t have been less subtle. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard this already. Ben’s not ours. He’s adopted.’

‘I did hear something – people gossip, you know. But I didn’t want to go supposing about something you might not want to tell me about.’

‘It’s best to be open,’ and Agnes felt a stab of Catholic conscience even as those words emerged from her own disguised ambulant-unit artificial mouth. ‘His real name’s Ogilvy, by the way – just in case something happens to us, and he ever needs to know.’

Marina nodded. ‘I understand. I’ll remember.’

‘Ben lost his parents early. They were both workers on a beanstalk – a space elevator, you know? On Earth West 17. They were in a kind of mobile workshop, outside the atmosphere. There was a leak, a decompression. The kind of accident that would have been entirely impossible a generation ago, if you think about it.

‘Their little boy ended up in a kids’ home where I used to work. But George and I were already looking to come out to a place like this, and it turned out that Ben’s parents had been planning to save their money and leave their jobs behind and strike out on their own in the same kind of way. And we thought, why not give Ben the life his parents intended for him? So we applied for adoption . . .’

And Lobsang, behind the scenes, in the final stages of their desperate wait, had bent a whole slew of rules, while Agnes had gone through agonies of doubt about whether she, a
robot
, could be a fit and suitable mother-surrogate for a three-year-old boy.

‘Well, here you are,’ Marina said. She clinked her lemonade glass against Agnes’s. ‘And I for one am glad to meet you. I’m sure you’ll get along fine, all three of you.’

‘Four including the cat,’ Agnes said with a smile. ‘Thank you, Marina.’

‘Listen, we have an Easter egg hunt. Dawn, the day after tomorrow.’

‘An Easter egg hunt?’

‘Just what we call it. And I know it’s not Easter. Come along and see. Now then, we can’t let those men of ours have all the fun out there . . .’

T
HE DAY OF
the Easter egg hunt was only Agnes’s fifth in the forest.

It was an early start. As Marina had said, the hunt was supposed to get going at dawn of this late summer’s day. Farmer’s wife Agnes was already getting used to rising early.

But she woke feeling woozy, oddly disoriented.

Her artificial body needed the food and drink she consumed, extracting various biochemical necessities. And it was programmed to deliver what felt like an authentic interval of sleep every night, complete with artfully simulated dreams. She would have insisted on such features if they hadn’t already been designed in: how could you even remotely consider yourself human if you didn’t eat, didn’t sleep? And after sixteen years in this new body and after various upgrades of the hardware and software, she knew herself well enough by now to understand that this peculiar feeling was nothing to do with having to get up at dawn, or with the unfamiliar food she’d eaten since arriving here, or even the moonshine she’d partaken of at the barn dance. No, this was more like jet lag: a modern-life nasty that she’d always been vulnerable to, and she had always avoided long-distance journeys as a result. Or it was like the kind of mild disorientation she got even when a local time zone changed the clocks by an hour.

That, and a faint but persistent sense of unease.

She went through her morning’s routine. She showered in the
gondola – another human touch – dressed and had a quick bite of breakfast, trying all the while to ignore that vague disquiet. She was unwilling to ask Lobsang to run her systems through an automated self-diagnosis. She was after all trying to live her life as a full human.

She didn’t even want to know the time. Or at least, that was the local rule.

One principle of this community, which they’d been made aware of even before they’d set out to come here, was:
no clocks
. At least, nothing mechanical, and certainly nothing electronic . . . You could build a sundial if you liked. The philosophy was that living so close to the rhythms of sun and moon, the days and the seasons, you didn’t
need
to track every picosecond – not unless you were planning to run a transcontinental railroad or some such and needed precise timings, and that, Agnes learned now, was why countries like nineteenth-century America had imposed nationally consistent time systems on their populations in the first place. It was the sort of feature that had actually attracted Lobsang here, a return to a more basic human way of living. He had embraced the idea. They’d brought no clocks! Lobsang had even made minor adjustments to the timers in their own artificial bodies, and in the gondola’s systems; such timers were necessary for the machinery that sustained them, of course, but now they couldn’t be accessed consciously.

It had been their choice. Now, though, a part of Agnes, nagged by this odd jetlag feeling, longed despite everything just to
know the right time
. . .

Preparing for the walk, she got together her gear: boots, a haversack, a light waterproof coat, dummy Stepper box. And she greeted Angie Clayton, a neighbour, a single mother, who was going to babysit the still-sleeping Ben for the few hours this ‘hunt’ was supposed to take. As they left the gondola, Oliver Irwin was waiting outside with Lobsang. The party was only a dozen or so, including Oliver and Marina and Nikos, their bright if oddly secretive twelve-year-old
son. Nikos looked to be the youngest of the party; there were no small children here.

Nobody else seemed to be having any problems this morning, most notably Lobsang – or if he did he wasn’t sharing them with her. Agnes tried to put all else aside and focus on the moment.

They headed down the hill from the gondola, towards a ford across the creek. Oliver Irwin walked with Lobsang and Agnes, pointing out the sights, of a landscape of dark green under a greyish dawn sky, with mist clinging in the hollows. ‘None of us here are first-footers, but we’re stuck with the names they gave to places. Your farm is on Manning Hill, and that’s about the highest point hereabouts. The river is called Soulsby Creek. The big clump of dense forest we’re heading towards, across the creek and a ways north, is Waldron Wood. The features of the landscape persist, a few steps to East and West anyhow. Geography’s stubborn in the Long Earth, when you go exploring.’ He ruffled his son’s hair. ‘Right, Nikos?’

Nikos was probably a little too old for that, Agnes thought. He ducked out of the way, grinning sheepishly.

Agnes thought she knew Oliver’s type. He and his wife Marina wouldn’t think of themselves as leaders in what was obviously a self-consciously leaderless community, but they were a kind of social hub, a go-to contact point for newcomers. Well, somebody had to be.

She asked, ‘So which is the old Poulson house, Nikos?’

Nikos looked at her sharply. ‘Big old place on the far side of your hill. What do you know about that?’

‘Why, nothing. Only that your mother told me you hang out there sometimes. Not a secret, is it?’

‘Hell, no.’

‘Language, Nikos,’ his father said mildly.

‘Just a place we hang out. Like you say.’

‘OK.’

They reached the creek; a faint, pungent mist hung over the water as they splashed across the shallow ford. On the far side, in ones and twos, they stepped East, the target for the ‘hunt’ being a short way stepwise. Agnes made sure she worked her own Stepper box convincingly, though Stepper technology was built into her frame. The stepping barely interrupted the conversation. It was just as she’d been told: while the core of New Springfield would always be the founders’ community on West 1,217,756, these people slid easily between the neighbouring worlds as and when they needed to, or felt like it.

As they formed up again, Oliver said, ‘About the Poulson house. We use it as a swap store. Otherwise it’s empty.’

‘Save for the local ghosts, according to your wife.’

Oliver grinned. ‘Every town needs a haunted house, I guess. Even a town that’s barely a town at all, like this one. I suppose you’re right to ask about it. If your Ben grows up like the other kids he’ll be down there up to no good with the rest soon enough . . .’

His voice tailed off as they approached the thicker forest. To Agnes, still standing in the open air, it looked like a green wall, from which soft hoots and cries echoed.

‘OK,’ Oliver said, ‘this is where we need to start keeping quiet. Don’t want to scare the little guys off.’

His companions spread out before the trees, pulling nets and wire snares from their bags, men, women and children alike. Without talking, working almost silently, they began to set traps, or took position under the branches with what looked to Agnes like butterfly nets. Some went deeper into the forest gloom to check over traps evidently laid earlier.

As the dawn advanced and the daylight brightened, Agnes started to make out a crowded undergrowth beneath the trees, what looked like ferns and horsetails, a dense mass of bushes, and flowering plants around which early bees buzzed. She felt a primitive dread at the idea of going into that thick green.

Oliver murmured to Agnes, ‘How’s your forest lore?’

‘I’m a city girl. I don’t recognize most of those trees, even.’

He smiled. ‘Well, some are variants of what we have on Datum Earth. Or used to have. Some aren’t.’ He pointed. ‘Laurel. Walnut. Dogwood. That’s a kind of dwarf sequoia, I think. The ones with the big flaring roots are laurels. The climbers are honeysuckle and strangler figs, mostly, but we get some grape vines . . .’

A little creature darted out from the tangle of a climber fig and ran across the open ground, evidently heading towards the water. It didn’t get very far before Nikos’s net slapped down around it.

The boy picked up the struggling little animal and, with brisk, confident movements, broke its neck. Then he fished out the prize from the net and held it up, dangling, before his father. The animal, maybe a foot long, looked like a miniature kangaroo to Agnes, with oversized hind legs. Oliver grinned back and gave him a thumb’s up.

It was like a cue for action. Agnes saw more animals emerging now, coming out one by one, clambering up the tree trunks and along the branches or on the ground, and even gliding through the air on membranous wing-like flaps of skin. And the nets flew. Most of the animals stayed out of reach, or scurried out of the way faster than the hunters could react, but a few fell to the nets and to the traps on the ground.

Soon a small pile of corpses built up before Agnes, and she stared at the strange forms. These were the local furballs, as the colonists called them, or a sample of them. Some were like distorted versions of creatures she was familiar with, like squirrels and opossums, and some were entirely different, as if dreamed up as special effects for some monster movie. She was struck by the detail, the striping of the fur, the staring open eyes: each creature exquisite, in its own way, even in death. At least the harvest the hunters were taking was light; the furballs were obviously so numerous that their wider communities would not be harmed.

Now a shaft of sunlight emerged from the mists to the east.

Oliver shaded his eyes and looked that way. ‘Sun’s fully up. Show’s over for now. The dawn’s always the best time to catch these critters. You can see they’re all tiny little guys, and not too graceful. That’s what you get if you’ve evolved to survive in a dense forest, I guess. And they all go for insects, rather than fruit or leaves. We think that’s because these trees are evergreens. They don’t discard their leaves, so make them poisonous or foul-tasting so they don’t get eaten.

‘All the furballs go hunting early, when the insects have started buzzing, but the cold-blooded creatures are still dopy from the chill of night: the lizards, the frogs, the toads. Hard to find a furball in the middle of the day.’ He glanced up at the canopy, towering above them. ‘We don’t know what else lives in the forest, I mean all the species. We only learn enough about their habits so we can trap them. And at night, you know, there’s a whole different suite of critters that come out in the dark. You can hear them hooting away. Nobody knows anything about
them
. Any-thing’s possible.’

‘And trolls,’ Lobsang/George said with a smile. ‘I heard them last night, and before. The call.’

‘Yeah. Nice to know they’re here, isn’t it? Now come on, you two, speaking of the big birds – Marina did promise you an Easter egg hunt. We’ll need to go into the forest, just a little way . . . Hey, Nikos. You found this nest, you want to lead?’

Entering the deeper forest wasn’t as bad as Agnes had feared. The biggest practical difficulty was just working out where to put her feet in the gloom. The ground was covered by a tangle of green, most but not all of it below knee height. She was glad to have Nikos lead the way, expert and silent, and to have Oliver and Lobsang to either side.

They came to a small clearing, and crouched down in the cover,
peering out, waiting. On the ground, at the foot of a stout sequoia, Agnes saw a mass of twigs and earth whose function was obvious, even given its size – it must have been six feet across.

‘It’s a bird’s nest,’ Lobsang breathed.

‘Of some damn big bird,’ Agnes said. ‘No wonder they’re taking their time. Making sure the mother isn’t around.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Shi-mi.

Agnes was startled by the small female voice, coming from the ground beside her. She glanced around quickly; the hunters were far enough away for them not to have heard the family pet speak. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I tracked the hunting group. Of course I would come here. I’m a cat. Save for the chickens people imported here, these big mothers are the only birds anybody’s found in this world . . .’

Oliver looked their way. He had noticed the cat, though hopefully he hadn’t heard her speak. He grinned and called softly, ‘Hey, kitty. So you found the nest? Well, this is a world where the birds chase the cats, so you’d better take care.’

Lobsang picked up Shi-mi. ‘Oh, she will,’ he said. ‘She will.’

Nikos said, ‘I think it’s clear, Dad.’

Oliver listened for a while, peered around in all directions. ‘OK. Quick and careful.’

Nikos got to his feet, loped across the clearing to the nest, and after a final glance around he reached into the nest with both arms and extracted an egg. It was maybe two feet long from end to end, and obviously heavy. He bundled this into netting, slung it over his shoulder, and made his way back to his father.

Oliver helped his son bind up the egg tighter, and smiled at Lobsang and Agnes. ‘This will make one hell of an omelette. But we’re not doing this for the food. You can see that these birds nest on the ground. Every so often we find a nest like this, where the bird has roamed too close to our campsites and hunting grounds for comfort. Gotta keep them away from the kids. So we remove
the egg, and with any luck the mother wanders away too. No problem, unless—’

Nikos pushed his father’s head down. ‘Unless the bird catches us,’ the boy whispered.

Now, crouching down as deep as she could, Agnes saw movement in the deeper forest, between the trees: a figure taller than a human walking on two tremendous legs, with a boulder of a body, a strong neck, a powerful beak. Surprisingly small wings were covered with iridescent blue feathers. The bird was a hunter itself, evidently; it was treading astonishingly quietly, round eyes above that cruel beak inspecting the undergrowth, the low branches.

‘So,’ Agnes murmured, quietly enough for just Lobsang and Shi-mi to hear, ‘when the furballs come out to hunt the insects,
this
comes out to hunt the furballs.’

‘That looks like a gastornis,’ the cat said softly. ‘A predatory flightless bird of the Palaeocene—’

‘Hush,’ Lobsang said. ‘I don’t want to know about it that way. We’ve come to live in this world, remember, not to study it.’

Shi-mi said, ‘And thereby denying the reality.’

That surprised Agnes. ‘Denying what? What reality?’

‘I too have had trouble sleeping, Agnes. As if the day is
too short
, subtly. And getting shorter.’