The Long Utopia

‘On Allied Drive.’

‘Was it? Can’t remember. I do remember those nuns. I asked for Maria. Said I was a cousin. Well, I was, wasn’t I? They didn’t trust me further than I could spit. Don’t blame them, looking back; I was seventeen years old and a piece of work, you know what I’m saying? I might have given up.’

‘If not for the money.’

‘If not for that. Then I saw her coming back from school, that was what did it for me. God, she was beautiful. You got your looks from my side, God have mercy on you. Well, I wasn’t going to give up after that. I found a way to get to her.’

‘How?’

‘Bribed a cleaner. It all became a scandal when—’

‘I know. Freddie, she was only fourteen.’

‘Yeah, mister high and mighty? Well, I was only seventeen, so there. Look, Joshua – you want me to tell you it was love at first sight? All I know is we liked each other, and I took her out a couple of times, she found a way to sneak out.’ He submitted to another coughing spasm. ‘We were just kids, OK? But I made her laugh, and she was rebellious and as cute as hell. We had fun, that’s all. At first. Though the nuns gave her a tough time.’

‘But you had the letter from the Fund in your pocket. Did you think you were entitled to her? This beautiful kid? That you had some kind of rights over her?’

‘No! It wasn’t like that. Christ, you should have been there. Look,’ and he seemed embarrassed, he leaned forward and whispered, ‘we never went past first base, OK? Until one night—’

‘Do I want to hear this, Freddie?’

He shrugged his hunched shoulders. ‘You came to me, remember. It was a summer night, 2001. She was looking her best. She had this cute pink angora sweater, and I remember she always wore this dumb little monkey bracelet that her mother had once given her. And I had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s I’d lifted—’

‘Oh, Christ, Freddie.’

‘What do you want me to tell you? It was ordinary. Just a fumble. We were drunk, we went too far. Ordinary. Sorry if that’s not what you want to hear.’ He leaned closer, and Joshua could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. ‘And I know it was illegal, but I never forced her. OK? I was stupid, not bad.’

‘So she got pregnant.’

‘Caught first time. Just our luck.’

‘And you ran out?’

Freddie spread his hands. ‘What would you have had me do? I couldn’t support her, let alone a kid. Even if it had been legal. I was a kid myself. Yeah, I ran. I figured those nuns would look after her better than I ever could.’

‘Not well enough,’ Joshua said grimly.

Freddie looked at him. ‘So that’s it. That’s the story, the top and bottom. I was just a kid, and I lived a whole life since then. If you want me to tell you I never loved again, I’d be lying. But I never forgot her, Joshua. Hurt me years later when the Fund told me she’d died.’

‘You never came to find me, did you?’

He laughed sourly. ‘Yeah. That would have gone down well. So now you found me. Now what?’

Joshua thought that over for a long moment. Then he stood. ‘I guess our business is done.’

‘Oh, is it? You think you got “closure” now?’ He made quote marks in the air with his fingers, to Joshua a very old-fashioned gesture highlighting an old-fashioned word. ‘Hey, where you going? Will you come see me again?’

Joshua considered that. ‘Maybe.’

‘Listen,’ Freddie called after him. ‘I know you’re disappointed. Whatever you expected of me, good or bad, I’ve always been that, at heart. Disappointing. But I’ll tell you something, Joshua. You never knew about me, but I knew about you. Followed you in the papers, and online. How could I not? After Step Day and all. Maybe I never came to see you. But I never asked you for money, did I, Joshua? And I’ll tell you something else. I never went back to the families for the money they owed. I mean, for fulfilling the contract, for knocking Maria up. That was the point of it all, wasn’t it? I never asked for that money, Joshua. Even though I was owed. That’s got to count for something, hasn’t it? Even though I was owed!’

Sally said, ‘And that was it?’

‘That was it.’

‘Have you been to see him again?’

Joshua shrugged. ‘I guess I will, when this latest Lobsang business has blown over.’

‘Just an ordinary guy, huh.’

‘Yeah. Not some demonic seducer. And not much older than me, though he looked it. That was the strangest thing. Didn’t feel like he was a father at all. We were just two old men together. Well, I got that monkey off my back, I guess.’

‘You atoned with your father, Joshua. Important step on your spiritual journey as a mythic hero.’

He squinted up at her. ‘You laughing at me?’

‘Me? Never. And I guess that whatever you say about Hackett and his cronies, they achieved what they set out to achieve. They changed the genetic composition of mankind. They changed the world, the whole future.’

‘And screwed up our lives in the process.’

‘True,’ she said. ‘So what now?’

‘So now we eat, sleep – or at least I do – and in the morning I go call the cops. And then we go find Grandpa Lobsang.’ He studied her. ‘Deal?’

She closed her eyes, cradling her rifle. Then she said, ‘Deal.’

38

NEW SPRINGFIELD COMMUNITY meetings were generally well attended. In a place where you had to make your own entertainment, people turned up, even if just in hope of seeing some fireworks. People would come drifting in from their stepwise lodges, the population slowly gathering. But this particular meeting was going to be fractious. Agnes knew it.

It was taking place outside the Irwins’ principal home, a sprawl of tepees and tents, just over the Soulsby Creek ford from Ma

All around them the blustery wind blew, and there was the usual stink of sulphur in the air, commonplace now, and somewhere sheep bleated miserably. Even the trees of the endless native forest were dying back. It wasn’t a happy day, it didn’t feel right. But then, Agnes reflected sadly, it hadn’t felt right here for months, if not years.

And over all their heads hovered the massive bulk of a twain: a military airship, the USS Brian Cowley.

The ship hung silent, its turbines idle, the great hull held in place by mooring ropes anchored to the ground. You couldn’t help but be intimidated by the huge ceramic armour plates of its underbelly with their weapons pods and spy-hole observation ports, or by the row of spruce military officers on the ground, who had come down from the ship to tell the folks of New Springfield that they were going to have to leave their home.

Agnes’s fears were fulfilled. From the begi

At Oliver’s invitation the ship’s captain, called Nathan Boss, a stiff-looking forty-something, stood up to make his pitch. ‘If you’ll just let me go through the logic of what we’re trying to do here—’

Somebody yelled, ‘Don’t go through anything. Just go away!’

Catcalls and laughter. That was fair enough, Agnes thought. These people had come out to this world precisely to get away from having smart men in uniforms tell them what to do.

‘We’re here to help you,’ Captain Boss tried now. ‘We came here with a team of scientists to study what’s going on here, in this world. And I brought with me a letter passed on from my own command chain – in fact there is a note for you from President Starling himself—’