Terry Pratchett - The Long Utopia

‘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 …’

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.

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?’