The Long Utopia

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.

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. Anything’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.’

Agnes, startled, said, ‘Too short? What could that possibly mean?’

But Shi-mi would say no more.

Now the bird had passed out of sight, evidently unaware as yet of the tampering with its nest. Silently Oliver and Nikos got to their feet, lugging the net with the egg, and started to make their way back out of the forest, gesturing for Agnes and the others to follow.

Lobsang got up. Agnes had no choice but to follow him.