Terry Pratchett - The Long Utopia

Nelson frowned, looking into the distance. ‘Which is rather unusual, if you think about it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that if even Lobsang couldn’t find anything, there must have been deliberate concealment. By somebody, somehow, for some reason.’ He grinned. ‘I’m suddenly intrigued, Joshua. This is the kind of puzzle that has always attracted me. I found Lobsang himself by following a research trail, you know – even though it turned out that he had engineered the whole thing. And since Lobsang has gone, my world has been rather depleted of conspiracy theories.’

Joshua studied him. ‘You’re thinking of researching this, aren’t you?’

Nelson patted his arm, and stiffly got to his feet. ‘Shall we make some more progress? The many candles on that birthday cake won’t blow themselves out.’

‘True enough.’

‘The many, many candles—’

‘I get it, Nelson.’

‘Hmm. But would you like me to follow this up? This business of your father. Think of it as another birthday present. If you would rather I didn’t—’

Joshua forced himself not to hesitate. ‘Do it.’

‘And if I do find something – considering the circumstances of Maria’s brief life, it could be distressing. One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’

‘Well, I’m a grown-up, Nelson.’ But he did remember how much Lobsang’s revelations about his mother had confounded him. ‘Look, I’ll trust your judgement, whatever you find. On my count, one, two—’

They winked stepwise together, with pops of displaced air.

EVEN 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.