The Long Utopia

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 gri

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.

12

IN THE SHADOW of a half-built liquid hydrogen plant, shielded from the intense Miami sun, Stan Berg was playing poker with a few construction workers.

In the year 2056, two years after the arrival of Lobsang and Agnes at New Springfield, Stan was sixteen years old. The purpose of this community, a much transformed Miami West 4, was to construct a space elevator, a ladder to the sky. But the construction of the Linsay beanstalk had been held up for weeks now. There was pretty much nothing to do. And so, at a table full of LETC stalk jacks twice his age or more – some ostentatiously wearing their hard hats even though they hadn’t worked for days – Stan played steadily, folding when necessary, wi

Rocky Lewis, the same age as Stan and his friend, or rival, from childhood, was standing back with a few others, watching the game for lack of anything better to do. Some of the audience leaned on home-made placards that protested about the latest lay-offs and delays.

And Rocky watched uneasily as the shards of spacecraft-hull ceramic that were being used as chips piled up in front of Stan.

The other players were starting to notice. Rocky had seen it all before. Their expressions were turning from kind of patronizing about the smart kid, to resentful at getting beat out hand after hand, to suspicious about some kind of cheating. The dealer was a young, slim guy in a tipped-back homburg hat who Rocky knew only as Marvin – not a worker here, as far as Rocky knew he was some kind of professional gambler – and he was becoming watchful too. Rocky knew that Stan wasn’t cheating. It was just that he was so damn smart. Stan said he liked games of bluff like poker, in fact, because unlike chess, say, there was no simple, logical way to get you through to victory from a given starting point; subtler qualities of the mind were needed.

But there was nothing subtle about the expression on the face of the guy sitting next to Stan, to his right, as yet again his chips were swept away to land up in front of Stan.

As Marvin cautiously began another hand, Rocky crouched down and plucked his friend’s sleeve. ‘Hey, buddy. Maybe we should get out of here.’

‘What for?’

‘Umm, you know. School stuff.’

‘School’s out today.’

That was true, the teacher had failed to turn up again, but these other characters wouldn’t necessarily know that. Stan was supremely bright but capable of making basic mistakes in situations like this. ‘Come on.’ Rocky stood up. ‘Cash in your chips.’