The Long Utopia

19

BEN SHRIEKED, ‘GO away!’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Ben,’ Lobsang said calmly.

Agnes, sitting with her sewing basket, suppressed a sigh, and steeled herself not to intervene.

Lobsang was standing over Ben and the cat-litter box. ‘You’ve done a good job with the litter, Ben. Shi-mi will appreciate it. But now you have to get washed because it will be time for supper soon, and I’m making mushroom soup. Look, there’s the pan on the hearth. You like mushroom soup.’

‘I hate ’shroom soup!’

‘That’s not what you said yesterday.’

‘You’re stupid.’

Lobsang laughed, as if the boy – now five years old, two years after their arrival here at New Springfield – had made a witty debating point. ‘That’s arguable.’

‘You’re also ugly. Ugly an’ stupid.’

‘That is a question of taste.’

‘You’re not my real Dad, you stupid!’

‘Well, now, Ben, we’ve been through that—’

‘Hate you, hate you!’ Ben tipped up the plastic box so the litter spilled over the kitchen floor. Then he ran out into the stockaded yard, banging the screen door behind him.

Lobsang stood and stared after him, arms folded. Then he turned to Agnes. ‘You could have helped.’

‘I’m helping by not helping.’

‘You’re the one with experience of these creatures.’

‘Children, Lobsang. They’re called children.’

‘Anybody who could raise Joshua Valienté to fully functioning adulthood – well, reasonably fully functioning – knows what they’re doing. So, then – if my prosthetic limb was faulty, I’d call in a prosthetics expert. My relationship with Ben is evidently faulty. You’re the expert.’

‘And you’re the one who wanted to be a father. Well, now’s your chance.’ She made shooing motions with her arms. ‘Go ahead – father!’

He shook his head and spread his hands, the way she remembered he used to when she had made him sweep the leaves in his troll reserve back in the Low Earths, and she’d said he’d done a shoddy job and made him start over. ‘But I don’t know where to begin. He hates me.’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘He said so!’

‘He’s five years old. He’s trying to jab at you. He barely knows what he’s saying.’ She sighed. ‘Look, Lobsang. Try to find out what’s really bothering him. That’s all the advice I’m going to give you.’

‘But—’

She held up a finger. ‘And if you try to drag me into this I’ll leave the room. Might even have one of my naps.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said bitterly, ‘your strategic naps.’

‘This is what you wanted,’ she repeated. ‘This is why we’re here.’

Lobsang heaved a sigh. ‘Well, I’d better get a broom to pick up this litter. At least I’m good at that.’

‘Leave some for Ben to clean up. Just to make the point …’

Two years into their New Springfield experience, they were both still learning – just like, Agnes supposed, the Irwins and the Todds and the Bells and the Bambers and all the other folk who’d been here long before they showed up. But that was the plan. Lobsang, who had been observing the pioneering of the Long Earth for years, now wanted to try it out for himself, as ‘George’.

Of course the New Springfielders had already achieved a lot. They knew about hygiene, for instance. They even made their own soap, from animal fat and potash from their charcoal burners. They had started making their own clothes as the stock they had brought from the Datum slowly wore out; they gathered hemp, flax, cotton, and wool from their own sheep and now Lobsang’s, which they were learning to card, spin and weave. They even made foul-smelling candles from the fat of the pigs that had gone wild in the forest. And they were utterly at ease with the stepwise extensions of their world, their landscape – most of the time, in fact, unless there was a barn dance or a town meeting on, much of the population was worlds away from the old core of the founders’ community. It was a way of relaxed, natural living in the Long Earth that Agnes had never witnessed before – and she imagined that the children growing up here, including Ben, would take it all utterly for granted.

In terms of their pioneering, they did cheat, as Agnes had slowly learned.

You saw few old folk, few very sick. They were lucky that one of the community, Bella Sarbrook, had some medical training, but when people got old, or seriously ill – or in one case when a couple had borne a disabled child – they tended to drift off back to the more sophisticated facilities of the Low Earths. Conversely the home-grown medicines and toiletries and stuff were supplemented by a trickle of produce from the Low Earths or Valhalla. Agnes didn’t see anything wrong with that. As long as the Low Earth cities existed, why not use them?

Lobsang meanwhile was running experiments in farming. With the help of the neighbours he’d cleared some of the old fields the first settlers had laid out, and ploughed the land with his horses and cattle and some human labour, and had tried out his first crops: wheat in the lighter soil, oats and potatoes where the ground was heavier. The first wheat harvest, small as it was, had drawn curious volunteers, to reap with handheld sickles, to thresh and winnow. While not primarily here to farm themselves, the adults saw it all as good fun, and ‘George’s’ small farm as a welcome addition to the education of their kids.

Of course it wasn’t all newly invented. Lobsang was very impressed when Oliver Irwin showed ‘George’ a complete set of the Whole Earth Catalog, downloaded on to a wind-up e-reader. Lobsang had copied it into his own library, which was a row of mostly physical books kept in the gondola, including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Verne’s Mysterious Island, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, Stewart’s When Earth Abides, Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Dartnell’s The Knowledge, and miniaturized bound magazine sets including early volumes of Scientific American, a pre-electronic Encyclopedia Britannica, even a facsimile of the first encyclopedia ever published, by Diderot in the seventeenth century. ‘Encyclopedias are hedges against the fall of civilization,’ Lobsang had said to Agnes, only slightly pompously. He seemed to have a long-term dream of building a civilization from scratch right here in the wilderness, like Verne’s stranded travellers in Mysterious Island, all the way up to electricity generators and copper phone wires – and maybe going further, coming up with a kind of portable ‘civilization kit’ to give to the combers and their kind, to ensure the lessons painfully learned over ten thousand years of human progress weren’t lost as humanity scattered across the Long Earth. Lobsang couldn’t help but think big.

For now, however, he seemed content with the watermill he was planning down by the creek to grind his wheat. One step at a time.

Ben meanwhile had already started at the informal local school, hosted in the open air, or in one shelter or another, on one world or another. There were only a dozen kids, of all ages from four or five up to fifteen or sixteen. Marina Irwin, mother of Nikos, was the nearest thing to a head teacher, and she had them work and play together as a group, the older ones helping the little ones, and she drafted in adults to teach specific classes, two or three kids at a time. A lot of the focus was on practical skills, from how to pick wild mushrooms, and using the stars to find your way home in the dark, to weapons and hunting classes for the older kids. But there was culture: Marina had a copy of a complete Shakespeare that she made good use of.

As for the adult world, Agnes had soon learned there was no formal law out here. Nobody had a desire to refer disputes to the Datum US government, which in theory still operated its ‘Aegis’ policy, enforcing the laws of the US across all the nation’s Long Earth footprints out to infinity. On the other hand there was no sign of the frontier justice you got in some remote communities. Many Corn Belt towns, for instance, had appointed sheriffs. Here, disputes were solved by mediation: by agreed compensation, with feasts that re-established friendships. None of that was as easy as it sounded, and it all required a hell of a lot of talking. But in such a small group the opposite to forgiveness and reconciliation was a long-standing feud, and nobody wanted that. People spent a lot of time talking through stuff out here – but then, they had the time to spare. And of course if the dispute couldn’t be resolved one or other party could just step away. There would always be room for that final solution …

But right now, Agnes didn’t want to leave.

Alone, she looked around, at this home they were fixing up. They’d got on with it quicker than she might have expected. This room, which Agnes called the parlour, had been done out by Lobsang like a small Buddhist temple, with a polished wooden floor, the walls coated with panels brought from the Low Earths and ornately decorated with red, gold, and splashes of green. All this was a long way from Agnes’s own Catholic tradition, but she liked the sense of symmetry and order, the scent of incense, and the smile on the face of the statue of the Buddha – quite a contrast to the anguished expression of the crucified Christ. And little Ben liked the bright colours, which he said were ‘Christmassy’.

They were happy here, Agnes decided. On balance. Life, as ever, was far from perfect. Sometimes all Agnes could see were the problems. But she had the wider perspective to see that overall, as best she could judge, the people here were getting it more right than wrong. Figuring out a new way of living, based on the long experience of mankind, and their own sturdy common sense. If this was why Sally Linsay had brought them here, it was a good choice.

The only problem was that Agnes was still having trouble sleeping.

She heard voices. Lobsang and Ben returning. She focused on her sewing.