The Long Utopia (6 page)

E
VEN AS THE
airship dropped its anchor at the summit of the low hill that dominated the heart of New Springfield, in a stepwise-parallel version of Maine on Earth West 1,217,756, Agnes could see the neighbours coming to call. She felt oddly nervous, as if she had stage fright. This was the moment her new life would begin, she thought, in this late summer of the year 2054 – nine full years after Lobsang’s ‘death’ – in her new home, with these new people.

Ben, three years old, could see the neighbours coming too. If he stood tall and held on to the rail with his chubby hands, he could just about look out of the gondola’s big observation windows without being lifted up, and being an independent little boy that was what he preferred. And as winches whirred, drawing the twain steadily down its anchor cables towards the ground, Ben jumped up and down, excited.

‘Of course they’d come over,’ Sally Linsay said, standing beside Agnes. ‘That’s what folk do. Check out the newcomer. Welcome you, if possible. Make sure you’re no threat, if necessary.’

‘Hmph. And if we are?’

‘Folk out here have ways of dealing with stuff,’ Sally said quietly. ‘Just remember, this is a big world. Almost all of it choked with jungle, just like this, or thicker. And only a handful of settlements. An easy place to lose problems.’

‘You make an empty world sound almost claustrophobic.’

‘These are good people, as people go. I wouldn’t have advised you to come here otherwise.’

But Sally said this with a kind of amused lilt in her voice, a lilt that had been there from the beginning, when she’d been approached for advice by Lobsang. (Or rather, she was approached by George, Agnes reminded herself,
George
; he was George Abrahams now and for ever, and
she
was not Sister Agnes but Mrs Agnes Abrahams, George’s faithful wife. And little Ben was no longer an Ogilvy but an Abrahams too; they had the adoption papers to say so – signed and dated in this year 2054, having waited so many years until the authorities, horribly overstretched in the continuing post-Yellowstone disruption, had finally approved a child for them to cherish . . .)

Sally had known Lobsang a long time, and she had been somewhat bemused by his choice of a new lifestyle. ‘Lobsang’s having a son? The farming, OK. The cat I can understand. Of course he’d bring Shi-mi. Lobsang and his damn cat. But – a
son
?’

Agnes had protested, ‘Ben’s orphaned. We will be able to give him a better life than—’

‘Lobsang wants a
son
?’

‘Lobsang is recovering, Sally. From a kind of breakdown, I think.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t so surprised about
that.
I suppose he was kind of unique: an antique AI, lots of technological generations all piled up on top of each other. We never ran an experiment like Lobsang before. Complex systems can just crash, from ecologies to economies . . . But most complex systems don’t come out of it wanting to play happy families.’

‘Don’t be unkind, Sally. He has always served mankind in his way, but from a distance. Now he wants to apprehend humanity more fully. He wants to
be
human. So we’re going to live in a regular human community, as anonymously as we can. We’re even going to fake illness, ageing—’

‘He already faked his own death.’

‘That was different—’

‘I was at the funeral! Agnes, Lobsang’s not human. He’s Daneel Olivaw! And he wants a
son
?’

There was no talking to her. As far as Agnes could tell Sally had given the matter of her recommendation of a future home for the family conscientious thought. Indeed there were already people living here, in New Springfield, apparently happy and healthy. And yet, why was it that Sally always found the whole project so funny? Even now, the moment they arrived here, as if she was hiding some kind of personal joke?

Lobsang came bustling into the cabin. Locked into the ambulant unit to be known as George Abrahams, he looked in his late fifties or maybe older, with sparse grey hair, a beard hiding much of his blandly handsome face, his skin tanned. He wore a checked shirt and jeans, and even now it was a jolt for Agnes to see him no longer in the orange robes of a Buddhist monk. He said, ‘Well, we’re down. I’ll go unpack the coffee pot before the neighbours get here.’

First impressions were always important. Agnes practised her own welcoming smile, working her cheeks, feeling her lips stretch.

Sally was watching her cynically. ‘Not bad. If I didn’t know you were a sock puppet too—’

‘Thank you, Sally.’

So Agnes, holding Ben’s hand, clambered down a short step from the grounded gondola and took her first footsteps on this new world, her home. At least the weather was good, the blue sky all but clear of cloud save for a few peculiar east-west streaks. And a half moon, too, hung silver in the eastern sky, as if to welcome them. This hilltop had evidently once been cleared but then abandoned; the trees here were young, saplings sprouting amid the squat stumps of fallen giants. Abandoned houses stood around, half-built and watchful. Lobsang’s plan was that they would take over one of
these big old houses and fix it up as their own, use these half-cleared fields for their own crops.

The cat, Shi-mi, scampered down the step, stretched luxuriously in the sunlight, and said, ‘Oh, how glorious to be free!’

Agnes turned on her. ‘Remember the golden rule, you plastic flea-bucket. No talking! Here you’re a cat, a whole cat and nothing but a cat – as far as Ben’s concerned, and everybody else. Also you’re over twenty years old. Act your age.’

‘Yes, Agnes.’ The cat was slim, white, healthy-looking, with eyes that glowed green, a little eerily. Her liquid female-human voice came from a small loudspeaker in her belly. ‘I’ll be good, I promise. It’s just that it’s such a relief to have nothing to do, now that I’ve retired from my Navy career with Maggie Kauffman. And now to discover what equivalent of mice and rats inhabit this glorious new world . . .’ She darted away into the green.

Ben laughed with delight in the warm late-morning sunshine, and immediately went running off too, into undergrowth that was waist-high for him. Agnes had anticipated this; he’d been the same at every stop they’d made on the way out here. ‘Don’t go out of sight, mind, Ben.’

‘OK, Ag-ness.’

Lobsang/George, meanwhile, was already working at the gondola, loosening the bolts and latches that fixed it to the twain envelope’s internal skeleton. The gondola was a brick-shaped block of ceramics and aluminium the size of a mobile home, suspended under a twain envelope two hundred feet long, and was designed to be detached and left behind. Sally, alongside him, was operating controls to draw down some of the envelope’s helium, the lift gas, into pressurized chambers, so the ship wouldn’t waft away into the air as soon as the weight of the gondola was gone.

The plan was that Sally would pilot the rump of the ship back to its Black Corporation dry dock on a Low Earth. The grounded gondola meanwhile would serve as a temporary shelter for Lobsang
and his ‘family’ in their first days, weeks, months here. It contained tools, seed stock, medical gear and vitamin supplements, pots and pans for the kitchen – even animals, including chickens and young goats and a couple of pregnant sows – everything they needed for a flying start at this new game of pioneering. Also the gondola held a few secrets that would have to remain hidden from the neighbours, locked behind blue doors, such as a workshop for their ambulant android bodies, including a small gel manufactory and a nanotech-based cosmetic facility which would enable George and Agnes to appear to ‘age’ naturally. There was even a kennel-sized workshop for the maintenance of the cat.

Lobsang, even in his alter ego as George Abrahams, had had the contacts at the Black Corporation to get all this built. ‘We don’t
have
to ride in on a mule through Death Pass,’ he’d said. ‘We don’t have to rough it. There’s nothing wrong with using the benefits of our past civilization, as we start anew. And besides we’ll have a little boy with us, remember? A roof over our heads when it rains on the first night will be a good thing . . .’

Maybe it was all necessary, Agnes thought, but she did wonder what kind of impression this gleaming structure was making on their new neighbours, who struck her as a ragged-looking lot as they continued up the trail to this hilltop. But she could see that the children were already entranced by the animals, most of them still inside the gondola: the sheep, the goats, the chickens, the cattle including one youthful bull for breeding, and a couple of muscular young horses. It struck Agnes that these children had probably never seen cattle or horses before.

Suddenly overwhelmed, she felt she needed a moment alone.

Following Ben, she walked away from the airship, climbing a gentle slope to the summit of this low hill. The way was easy as long as she stepped around the fallen trunks and branches that seemed to lie everywhere. The ground was soft under her boots, and covered with what looked like ferns sprawling between the
lichen-choked fallen trunks. It all seemed mundane to Agnes, and yet it was not, if you looked closely. What species were these trees, for instance? The trees in this part of the world were mostly evergreens, she’d been told, even here at the latitude of Maine; the seasonal variations weren’t strong, on this warm, wet world, and few trees troubled to shed their leaves come the fall. But she didn’t recognize the species.

A few paces further on she came to a length of dry stone wall, built by some earlier settler to contain his or her animals. It couldn’t be more than a few decades old; it was not yet forty years since Step Day, and humans had been very rare beyond the Datum before then, just a few natural steppers wandering through the emptiness. But the wall was already disappearing into the green.

Agnes could read the history of this place, this hilltop. The first settlers here must have made a start at clearing fields for their crops or livestock, even put up these grand houses. Then, after no time at all, they had evidently given up and wandered off to do – well, whatever it was most people did around here to make a living these days. And now here was the forest already taking back the land, or trying to. This was why Sally had scoped out this abandoned plot as a likely site for Lobsang and Agnes to build a farm of their own; a lot of the grunt work of clearing had already been done.

And all around this low hill with its abandoned farmstead the forest stretched away, dense and green. This was a world of trees, Agnes knew that much. Thick evergreen woodland cloaked much of North America, with exotic kinds of rainforest in southern latitudes, and peculiar broad-leaved deciduous trees growing in the Arctic – even in Antarctica to the south there were trees all the way to the pole, and
that
was a sight Lobsang promised they’d go see some day. It was a world far from the Ice Belt within which nestled the Datum Earth, her own home world: here, it seemed, the forests had hung on since the days of the dinosaurs.

And in these global forests was life unlike anything she’d been
familiar with at home. Standing here now, she could hear that life all around her, peculiar hoots and cries echoing as if she stood in some vast cathedral, and the occasional crack as, presumably, some big beast pushed its way through the undergrowth.

Sally Linsay came striding up to her, sweating from her work, sipping water from a plastic bottle. Agnes noted with approval that Sally’s first instinct was to check on Ben, who seemed to be fascinated by a kind of termite mound.

Now Sally said simply, ‘Neighbours.’

A handful of people, men, women and children, dressed in rather drab colours, brown and green, were clustered around Lobsang and the gondola. One boy, maybe twelve years old, was bending down to tickle a compliant Shi-mi, and Agnes could hear his clear, light voice. ‘Cute, ain’t you? Wait until my Rio catches sight of you, though. My word, you’ll be getting some exercise then . . .’

Sally said, ‘The kids are your friends for life if you’ll let them brush those horses. Lobsang’s already got coffee percolating on the gas stove.’

‘Giving away all our luxuries on the first day?’

Sally shrugged. ‘Making a good impression on the neighbours. Never hurts. Coffee is
good
.’ She inspected Agnes. ‘So how are you feeling?’

Agnes thought it over. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said honestly. ‘All this seemed fine in theory. To be uprooted, and chucked across a million worlds. Making the plans and preparations was fun, even the twain ride was fun. And bringing Ben into our lives was wonderful, of course. But now I’m actually here—’

‘It’s all too strange? You’d be surprised how many people try to cover up that reaction.’

‘Well, I’m no faker. I’m a city girl. Why, I used to think I was lost in the wilds when I was out of sight of the gift shop in the Madison Arboretum. And now,
this
.’

‘The consolation is,’ Sally said, ‘people are trying to make a living
in worse places. These worlds are kind: they’re warm, moist, mostly unseasonal. And safe, relatively. Which is why I chose this place for you. That’s because the forest keeps the critters here small.’ And, characteristically, she added, ‘Well, mostly.’

This was Sally being kind, Agnes reflected. Reassuring, as much as she could be; there was always an edge.

Then a breeze from the west blew up, oddly sharp. Sally turned, frowning, holding on to her battered hat. The forest, the nearby trees, rustled, and the general hooting and cawing seemed to sharpen into cries of alarm. Agnes saw that the sparse clouds were streaky now, long stripes – almost like contrails, but no jets ploughed these skies.

And she saw something else: a flash, from the corner of her eye. She found herself looking at the moon, half full, the familiar features washed out by the blue sky. She’d have sworn that the flash had come from the moon, from the dark half, that shadowed hemisphere. It was probably nothing. A firefly? A bird? Not that she’d seen any birds here yet. Or, more likely still, just something in her eye.

None of this convinced her. Something didn’t feel right. That was her immediate, sharp instinct. And from the way Sally reacted, Agnes sensed that she felt the same way.