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.
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!’
10
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.’
‘List
en, 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 . . .’
11
THE 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.
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