The Long Utopia

36

SALLY WAS HUNCHED over her bronze rifle, peering down at the farmhouse. ‘I know some of this. My father was never a stepper himself. But he married into a family of steppers.’

‘I remember how you told me that as a kid you used to take your father over into stepwise Wyoming, where he had his workshop. Nelson said your mother came from an Irish offshoot of the Hackett clan.’

‘My father loved my mother. I guess he still does love her memory, for all his other faults. And he was fascinated by stepping, even though he was no stepper himself. He studied the phenomenon scientifically, eventually dreamed up the Stepper box. But he hated my mother’s family – the “old-country clan”, he called them – with their letters and phone calls. You see, before she met my father, there had been some family pressure on my mother to “marry the right sort”. I always thought it was to do with money. Well, that was the story they told us kids at the time. I never knew different, until now. Never knew they were breeding steppers. My father never told me. Even though we went all the way to Mars and back together! I suppose it never occurred to him to confide in me. Knowing him, it wouldn’t.’

‘I never heard from any Fund when I was growing up,’ Joshua said. ‘I suppose the Sisters would have kept them away from me, even if they found me. And they never put pressure on you?’

‘They may have tried, but if so they could never find me. I stepped away from Datum Madison a year after Step Day, and I never came back again. Not long enough to be tracked down by that shadowy coven, anyhow. Of course my father got his revenge on them, with Step Day. After that almost anybody could step, with a Stepper box costing a few bucks, and that blew their nasty little conspiracy wide open.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Anyhow, what about your father? Did Nelson find him in the end? That was the point of the exercise.’

He took a breath. ‘Yes, Nelson found him, Sally. Through the Fund’s records. He’s in a retirement home in New York, West 5. Originally from the Bronx – he’s Irish American.’

‘Heart-warming. Less of the stalling, Valienté. Spill the beans.’

‘He’s – ordinary. He’s called Freddie. Freddie Burdon. You know I grew up using my mother’s name. Of course the Home had no records of my father.’

‘Burdon. Another genetic legacy of the Discorporea days, then.’

‘Yes, but he never stepped, not before Step Day. I guess he carried the gene, though. He’s seventy-four years old now; he was only eighteen when I was born – seventeen when I was conceived. Just a kid, for God’s sake …’