The Long Utopia

21

THERE WAS SOMETHING wrong with the world.

Three years after her arrival here with Lobsang, Ben and Shi-mi, that was Agnes’s definitive view of Earth West 1,217,756.

Oh, the people were fine. And it was the people who mattered in the end; Agnes had always known that, and the rest was just a backdrop.

But the world was weird.

Take the old Poulson place. In the beginning it had been Nikos Irwin, with his dog, who had spent his waking hours in that dilapidated swap house on the far side of Manning Hill. Nikos and his buddies seemed to be growing up now and losing interest, but their place was being taken by a new generation, including Ben and Nikos’s little sister Lydia. Agnes had heard the lurid ghost stories, and dismissed them, but she could sense something odd every time she went down there, usually in search of Ben. Strange scents, elusive in the forest air. Once, a peculiar greenish light that had come emanating from the back of the house – only a glimpse, there and gone again. In Agnes’s last incarnation, her own fatal illness had begun with a hard lump on her skin that didn’t belong. The Poulson house was the same, she thought. It was a flaw, something wrong, something unwelcome, that didn’t belong in this world. She hadn’t yet decided to ban Ben from the place – she dreaded the battle that would follow if she tried – but she was moving towards it.

Above all, Agnes discovered, she hated not to be able to tell the time, house rules or not. Since she’d arrived she’d never felt as if she was sleeping properly here. The dawn always came too early, no matter what time of year it was. Sometimes she sensed that others had the same feeling, Marina Irwin for instance when she came round for morning coffee: a certain tiredness, a vagueness, muddled thinking. But without a decent watch Agnes couldn’t tell if her sleep patterns actually were drifting, or by how much.

Even the animals seemed distressed. The furballs would emerge from their burrows and their holes in the trees at the wrong time. Sometimes the big birds would charge around the forest almost randomly, screeching like eagles.

She had considered asking Lobsang for access to her internal timers, or the clocks in the gondola. She kept putting it off; she felt as if that would be the beginning of the end, the fracturing of the dream.

Lobsang meanwhile wouldn’t comment on any of this. Instead ‘George’ just kept his head down. He worked on his farm despite the vagaries of the weather, strengthened the stockade around their plot, fixed the roof of the house they were extending one room at a time, pulled weeds from his flower beds and cultivated his kitchen garden, and tended his animals and crops. He was sociable enough. He joined in the hunts. And, comically, he was trying to learn the fiddle so he could play at barn dances, filling the evening air on Manning Hill with a sound like an arthritic warthog.

Agnes supposed that in a way his behaviour represented a victory for her. He had revived her in the first place in order to provide a balance to his own tendencies towards omniscience and omnipotence. But now, and maybe it was typical of Lobsang and his obsessiveness to go to extremes, he’d abandoned his old self entirely and had devoted himself completely to this new life as ‘George’, rooted in the soil of a remote Earth.

And he resolutely refused to think about anomalies in the world. Even the occasional flashes they saw on the face of the moon didn’t distract him from his concentration on pioneering mundanity.

Well, that wasn’t enough for Agnes, not any more. She decided to do something about it.

Shi-mi came to see her as she struggled with her gadgetry in the yard, in the lee of the house, away from the prevailing wind on this bright spring day. She’d taken a plastic funnel from her kitchen store, hung it from a bracket, filled it with fine sand from the bank of the creek, and allowed the sand to run out into a bucket. Now she was sitting on the ground and measuring her own pulse as the sand ran down.

If this world wouldn’t allow clocks to work, she’d decided, she would damn well build her own. Never mind electronics, or even clockwork which was almost as much of a mystery to her. She’d gone back to basics.

The cat walked up somewhat stiffly, lay down beside her and inspected the rig. ‘If I may ask, Agnes – what on Earth are you doing?’

‘Can’t you tell? I’m making an hourglass. And I’m missing Joshua. He’d put together something for me in a couple of hours, in a polished wooden case, probably …’

The cat licked her paws. ‘There are a number of ways to tell the time. By a simple sundial for instance. Though that would take some weeks, at least, to calibrate.’

‘I intend to do that too. But I want some other way, independent of the sun. I want to measure the length of the day. Shi-mi, I know this sounds dumb.’

‘I travelled months on twains run by US Navy grunts. Believe me, nothing you say about mechanical matters will sound dumb to me. And I do know why you need to do this. We spoke of it before—’

‘I think there’s something wrong with time here,’ Agnes blurted. ‘The days are too short – or maybe too long. I don’t know. All I do know is I’m having trouble sleeping, and always have had. And as all our watches and clocks are either back home in Madison West 5 or out of bounds—’

‘My internal clocks are not accessible to me either.’

‘—and I don’t want to ask Lobsang because I think it would upset him if I started breaking the rules around here, I need to make some other kind of measurement. I figure that if I can measure an hour accurately, say, then I’ll stay awake for a day and a night, from dawn to dawn, and just count the hours, count how often I have to empty the bucket. It’s crude but better than nothing.’

‘Noon to noon would be better. Easier to mark accurately. A sundial would help you with that. And it may be more precise to have smaller buckets, measuring half- or quarter-hours … Or you could use both, to cross-check the measurements. But how can you be sure your hourglass measures a true hour in the first place?’

‘That’s my problem, all right.’ She showed the cat her wrist, her thumb pressed on a vein. ‘My resting pulse has always been pretty steady, fifty beats a minute.’

‘A strong heart.’

‘Yes. I assume Lobsang will have replicated that when he, umm, remade me.’

‘That is a very uncertain baseline.’

Agnes found it hard not to be sarcastic to a talking cat. ‘I suppose you have a better way?’

‘Yes. Build a pendulum.’

‘A what?’

‘A simple pendulum. A thread suspended from a beam, supporting a weight. The length of the thread determines the period of the swing. A length of thirty-nine inches will give you a period of two seconds, almost exactly. That’s if the pull of gravity here is the same as on the Datum, and when we arrived we measured that, among other parameters … A longer length would give you a longer period, more accuracy. You could use a reliable reference like that to build from. Make sand cups to measure a minute, combine them to get five minutes, thirty—’

Impulsively Agnes leaned over, cupped Shi-mi’s face, and kissed the top of her head. ‘Cat, you’re a genius.’

But Shi-mi shrank back from her touch.

Agnes immediately forgot about her high school science experiments. Shi-mi had never reacted like that before, not ever. ‘Shi-mi? What is it?’ She picked the cat up, though Shi-mi wriggled in faint protest, and inspected her body, felt her limbs – and probed her belly, where she found hard masses. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I am old, Agnes,’ the cat said, lying in her arms. ‘Or so I have been programmed to become. My body swarms with nanotech agents, ageing me day by day. And because I am old I am ill. I suffer from a meticulously simulated arthritis, and various of my organs have problems. A remarkable feat of artifice.’

‘Does it hurt?’

The cat said nothing.

‘Well, would you like something to be done?’ After only three years here, Agnes had not yet thought hard about her own future, the years when it would start to become odd if she did not show signs of age. She did know Lobsang had brought a suite of systems to allow them to adjust their appearance – but she also knew there were other options. ‘You don’t have to go through this. We could rebuild you. Fake your death. We could even call a twain and pretend it brought us another, younger cat.’

‘No. I am myself,’ Shi-mi said firmly. ‘I have long memories. I was made by the Black Corporation as a mere technology demonstrator. But I sailed with Joshua and Lobsang on their first journey together, to the High Meggers and beyond. I travelled with Captain Maggie Kauffman to the ends of the Long Earth. In these last years I have been Ben’s cat, nothing more, nothing less. I am not willing to discard all that.’

‘You wouldn’t have to. You’d still be yourself inside.’

The cat looked up at her, her peculiar LED-green eyes somewhat dimmed. ‘I could not become some rowdy kitten and still be me. In any event there is no crisis, not yet, no decisions need be made. And I—’

But now Ben came running into the yard, and the conversation was ended.

Six years old, clothes scuffed, knees grubby, face a mud pack, hair a mess, Ben was a bundle of energy. He carried a basket of grapes. ‘Agnes! Agnes! Look!’ He held out his basket, and Agnes saw something gleam on his right arm, a kind of silver bracelet.

She put down the cat, carefully. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Grapes!’

‘I can see that. On your arm.’

Hastily he hid the arm behind his back. ‘Nothin’. Can I take the grapes in? Can I have some?’

‘Come here, young man.’ She held out her hand, palm up. ‘Right hand please.’

Agnes’s authoritative voice had been honed over two partial lifetimes dealing with children of all shapes, sizes and inner conditions, and Ben was nowhere near the most difficult she’d had to deal with. And now, clutching his grapes awkwardly, he walked up to Agnes and obediently stuck out his arm.

The bracelet was a little too big for him, and she slipped it off his wrist and over his hand easily. It was a simple loop of metal, evidently silver, evidently well made, and it was heavy; it had to be valuable. Price tags in dollars and cents didn’t mean much here, but such items as this, usually brought out as heirlooms or tokens of weddings and whatnot, were prized.

Shi-mi murmured to her – too softly for the boy to hear; they still hadn’t told Ben that Shi-mi was artificial. ‘I’ve seen other children wearing such things. Rings, bangles.’

‘I suppose I have too,’ Agnes whispered back. ‘I thought nothing of it.’ She held out the bracelet. ‘What do you make of it?’

Shi-mi licked it. ‘High-grade silver,’ she said. ‘Very pure. Very finely manufactured, to very precise tolerances. This is machine-made; it didn’t come out of some home workshop.’

‘There’s nothing like that here. The nearest to home-made jewellery we have are the reed brooches Bella Sarbrook makes in the fall.’

‘Also no hallmark. So it doesn’t appear to be of Datum or Low Earth origin either.’

‘Then where—’

‘Who ya talkin’ to?’

‘Nobody, honey. Just myself. Now, where did you get this, Ben? You’re not in trouble. Just tell me. Was it the old Poulson place?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Have you been down there again?’

‘Uh huh,’ he said reluctantly.

‘In that cellar again no doubt. No wonder you’re filthy. So who gave you this bracelet?’

‘No one.’

‘Then where did you get it?’

‘Swap stuff.’

And Agnes’s heart broke, just a little, for this was the first time she was aware of that Ben had deliberately lied to her. ‘No, Ben. It wasn’t in with the swap stuff. The swap stuff in that house is leaky saucepans and broken brooms and clothes people have grown out of. That’s what the swap stuff is. Nobody puts lovely things like this in the swap stuff. So who gave it to you? Was it one of the other kids? Was it Nikos?’ Her head spun briefly with ideas of theft, or some kind of cache left behind by the Poulsons, people she’d never met …

‘Beetle man.’

The answer, totally unexpected, stunned her. ‘What did you say?’

‘Beetle man. He gave it. Nikos said it wasn’t wrong.’

‘Beetle man. What’s the beetle man like?’

Ben grinned. ‘Funny.’

She studied him, thinking hard. ‘OK, Ben. Look, it’s getting late. You run on in and wash your face now.’ When he’d gone, she said to Shi-mi, ‘When Lobsang comes in, he and I will be having a long chat. And tomorrow I’m going to the Poulson place myself. Without Ben, with Nikos. And with Lobsang, if I have to drag him by his prosthetic nose.’ She tucked the bracelet into a pocket. Then she looked down, forcing a smile, and stroked Shi-mi’s back. ‘Now, shall we see how far we can get with this pendulum business? How long a string did you say – thirty-nine inches?’