‘It’s all too strange? You’d be surprised how many people try to cover up that reaction.’
‘Well, I’m no faker. I’m a city girl. Why, I used to think I was lost in the wilds when I was out of sight of the gift shop in the Madison Arboretum. And now, this.’
‘The consolation is,’ Sally said, ‘people are trying to make a living in worse places. These worlds are kind: they’re warm, moist, mostly unseasonal. And safe, relatively. Which is why I chose this place for you. That’s because the forest keeps the critters here small.’ And, characteristically, she added, ‘Well, mostly.’
This was Sally being kind, Agnes reflected. Reassuring, as much as she could be; there was always an edge.
Then a breeze from the west blew up, oddly sharp. Sally turned, frowning, holding on to her battered hat. The forest, the nearby trees, rustled, and the general hooting and cawing seemed to sharpen into cries of alarm. Agnes saw that the sparse clouds were streaky now, long stripes – almost like contrails, but no jets ploughed these skies.
And she saw something else: a flash, from the corner of her eye. She found herself looking at the moon, half full, the familiar features washed out by the blue sky. She’d have sworn that the flash had come from the moon, from the dark half, that shadowed hemisphere. It was probably nothing. A firefly? A bird? Not that she’d seen any birds here yet. Or, more likely still, just something in her eye.
None of this convinced her. Something didn’t feel right. That was her immediate, sharp instinct. And from the way Sally reacted, Agnes sensed that she felt the same way.
But Ben was here, tugging at her hand, pulling her back into his life. ‘Ag-ness?’
She forced a smile. ‘Hello, honey. Come on, shall we go have some lunch and meet some new friends?’
‘Lunch!’
10
A COUPLE OF days later, with Sally and the airship long gone, the family were invited to a barn dance. This was to be held in an open space down by the creek that wound its way around the hill where their gondola sat – and, as decided at the last minute, a couple of steps East, as the weather was a little better there that evening. Of course they would have accepted even if it hadn’t turned out that the event was being mounted in their honour.
Somewhat nervously, Agnes got herself ready for the evening. Before the journey out here, before they’d been discharged from the Black Corporation laboratories for the last time, Agnes had had her ambulant body set to look as if she was around her middle fifties: a few years younger, apparently, than Lobsang. And a mere forty years or so younger than her calendar age … Well, fifties was an age she’d lived through once already; she knew how to make the best of her greying hair, and she’d packed a decent gingham dress that she knew would suit her on the night. Lobsang meanwhile wore a loud checked shirt, jeans and cowboy boots – and little Ben was kitted out in a scale model of exactly the same gear. The outfit wasn’t going to last, he’d grow out of it in a few months, but Sally had suggested packing it to make a first impression on just such an occasion as this.
So, prepared, they joined their neighbours.
The barn dance turned out to be just what Agnes would have expected. This field by the stream, roughly cleared and fenced off, was evidently intended for sheep, and Agnes saw a small flock in a pen not far away. Now, in the gathering twilight, the open space was lit by burning brands that gave off a tar-like smell. There was a ribald caller with a couple of fiddlers standing on crates pumping out the music, and the people, maybe fifty in all, men, women and kids, lined up and whirled around. It was a scene Agnes imagined you could have seen anywhere in rural America back on the Datum for decades, if not centuries. The difference here was the incase-of-emergency Stepper boxes that bounced on people’s hips as they danced.
There was a bar at one end of the field, where you could fill up on the juice of some unidentifiable citrus, or water, or on quite good home-brew beer. There were even a few bottles of whisky. A barbecue sizzled and popped, but the food on the grill was mostly unfamiliar to Agnes: strips of red meat, presumably from the little local mammals they called ‘furballs’, and one monster of a drumstick that must have come from one of the local ‘big birds’, there more for show than for eating – it would probably take all night to cook a joint the size of a whole turkey. And there were oat-flour cookies, and slices of pumpkin. A few dogs ran around yapping, or begging for food scraps. Shi-mi, naturally enough, was nowhere to be seen.
Soon they were grabbed by their new neighbours and pulled into the dance.
Agnes had been to enough dances in her misspent youth to have the general idea, but she found herself having to learn new steps rapidly as she went along. Lobsang seemed to be struggling more than she was, and once even tripped over his feet and landed on the deck, only to be picked up again by his neighbours, laughing.
In the heat, noise and laughter, Agnes quickly tired – or rather, emotionless software in her gel-filled head ran programs to simulate tiredness, triggered fake sweat glands, and made her mechanical lungs pump harder at the warm air. She tried to embrace the feeling, and put aside the fact that she was basically living out a lie before these evidently good people.
When she took a break, Lobsang joined her by the rough-and-ready bar. He said, sipping a whisky, ‘I will always regret that I now have conscious control over my degree of drunkenness. And we could have been better prepared for this. We spent nine years training to be pioneers. We should have just downloaded a barn-dancing application.’
Agnes snorted. ‘Where’s the fun in that? Or the authenticity? You’re a city boy come to learn the ways of the country, Lob—George. Get used to it. Enjoy.’
‘Yes, but—’ He was interrupted, grabbed at the elbows by two burly middle-aged women who hauled him back into the line.
A smiling woman, dark, forty-ish, approached Agnes with a fresh cup of lemonade. ‘Sorry about that. We always seem to be short of men at these dances, and Bella and Meg can be a little boisterous when there’s fresh meat around. Like big birds on the prowl.’
‘Fresh meat? George will be flattered. Nothing fresh about us, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that; you’re making a fine impression.’ She stuck out her hand to shake. ‘I am Marina Irwin. My husband Oliver is out there somewhere.’
‘Irwin. Oh, it’s your boy who’s babysitting for us tonight. Nikos?’
‘That’s right. For a suitable fee, I’m sure. Quite the capitalist, my Nikos, for a twelve-year-old boy who’s grown up out in the green.’
‘It’s kind of him to miss the dance for us.’
‘Well, it was a sacrifice for him. But give him another year and we won’t be able to prise him away from the girls …’
Maybe, Agnes thought doubtfully. She had met rather a lot of twelve-year-old boys during her years in the Home in Madison, and Nikos struck her immediately as a decent enough kid – but a kid with a secret, a big one, an observation that had nagged at her since she’d met him.
Marina was still talking. ‘… I wouldn’t object if you gave him some work on your farmstead, by the way. It would be good for him to have some experience of that. Not many of us farm any more.’
Agnes pointed. ‘Sheep over there.’
‘Sure. We keep sheep mostly for the wool,’ and she smoothed her own dress, which, Agnes saw in the uncertain light, was knitted, and tinted a pleasant apple-green, presumably by some vegetable dye. ‘All you get from the local furballs – the forest animals – are scraps of skin. The feathers from the big birds are more useful, actually.’ Her voice had a pleasant lilt, Mediterranean, perhaps Greek, Agnes thought. ‘We do raise some crops – mostly potatoes, for the Stepper boxes. And for emergency food reserves, though this world is so clement we rarely need to dig into those.’ Though, even as she said that, the breeze picked up again, and Marina pushed loose hair from her forehead with a puzzled frown. She went on, ‘The first people here intended to go in for farming – they cleared the forest, marked out fields, the works. The old Barrow place up on Manning Hill, that you’ve taken over? That was one of them, as you’ll have guessed. And the old Poulson house is another – you know, the swap house, our local haunted house! My Nikos spends half his life in there, I think it’s a kind of clubhouse for him and his buddies. He’ll grow out of that.’