“Got to muck out the barn,” Joe protested.
“It can wait on breakfast,” Maddie said shakily. “I need you.”
“Okay.” Joe nodded. She was looking bad; it had been a few years since her last fatal breakdown, but when Maddie said I need you it was a bad idea to ignore her. That way led to backbreaking labour on the biofab and loading her backup tapes into the new body; always a messy business. He took her arm and steered her towards the back porch. They were nearly there when he paused.
“What is it?” asked Maddie.
“Haven’t seen Bob for a while,” he said slowly. “Sent him to let the cows into the north paddock after milking. Do you think—”
“We can check from the control room,” she said tiredly. “Are you really worried…?”
“With that thing blundering around? What do you think?”
“He’s a good working dog,” Maddie said uncertainly. “It won’t hurt him. He’ll be alright; just you page him.”
AFTER JOE HELPED her out of her battle dress, and after Maddie spent a good long while calming down, they breakfasted on eggs from their own hens, home-made cheese, and toasted bread made with rye from the hippie commune on the other side of the valley. The stone-floored kitchen in the dilapidated house they’d squatted and rebuilt together over the past twenty years was warm and homely. The only purchase from outside the valley was the coffee, beans from a hardy GM strain that grew like a straggling teenager’s beard all along the Cumbrian hilltops. They didn’t say much: Joe, because he never did, and Maddie, because there wasn’t anything that she wanted to say. Silence kept her personal demons down. They’d known each other for many years, and even when there wasn’t anything to say they could cope with each other’s silence. The voice radio on the windowsill opposite the cast-iron stove stayed off, along with the TV set hanging on the wall next to the fridge. Breakfast was a quiet time of day.
“Dog’s not answering,” Joe commented over the dregs of his coffee.
“He’s a good dog.” Maddie glanced at the yard gate uncertainly. “You afraid he’s going to run away to Jupiter?”
“He was with me in the shed.” Joe picked up his plate and carried it to the sink, began running hot water onto the dishes. “After I cleaned the lines I told him to go take the herd up the paddock while I did the barn.” He glanced up, looking out the window with a worried expression. The Massey-Fergusson was parked right in front of the open barn doors as if holding at bay the mountain of dung, straw, and silage that mounded up inside like an invading odious enemy, relic of a frosty winter past.
Maddie shoved him aside gently and picked up one of the walkie-talkies from the charge point on the window sill. It bleeped and chuckled at her. “Bob, come in, over.” She frowned. “He’s probably lost his headset again.”
Joe racked the wet plates to dry. “I’ll move the midden. You want to go find him?”
“I’ll do that.” Maddie’s frown promised a talking-to in store for the dog when she caught up with him. Not that Bob would mind: words ran off him like water off a duck’s back. “Cameras first.” She prodded the battered TV set to life and grainy bisected views flickered across the screen, garden, yard, dutch barn, north paddock, east paddock, main field, copse. “Hmm.”
She was still fiddling with the smallholding surveillance system when Joe clambered back into the driver’s seat of the tractor and fired it up once more. This time there was no cough of black smoke, and as he hauled the mess of manure out of the barn and piled it into a three-metre-high midden, a quarter of a ton at a time, he almost managed to forget about the morning’s unwelcome visitor. Almost.
By late morning the midden was humming with flies and producing a remarkable stench, but the barn was clean enough to flush out with a hose and broom. Joe was about to begin hauling the midden over to the fermentation tanks buried round the far side of the house when he saw Maddie coming back up the path, shaking her head. He knew at once what was wrong.
“Bob,” he said, expectantly.
“Bob’s fine. I left him riding shotgun on the goats.” Her expression was peculiar. “But that farm—”
“Where?” he asked, hurrying after her.
“Sqautting in the woods down by the stream,” she said tersely. “Just over our fence.”
“It’s not trespassing, then.”
“It’s put down feeder roots! Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I don’t—” Joe’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh.”
“Yes. oh.” She stared back at the outbuildings between their home and the woods at the bottom of their smallholding, and if looks could kill, the intruder would be dead a thousand times over. “It’s going to estivate, Joe, then it’s going to grow to maturity on our patch. And do you know where it said it was going to go when it finishes growing? Jupiter!”
“Bugger,” Joe said faintly, as the true gravity of their situation began to sink in. “We’ll have to deal with it first.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Maddie finished. But Joe was already on his way out the door. She watched him crossing the yard, then shook her head. “Why am I stuck here?” she asked herself, but the cooker wasn’t answering.
THE HAMLET OF Outer Cheswick lay four kilometres down the road from Armitage End, four kilometres past mostly derelict houses and broken-down barns, fields given over to weeds and walls damaged by trees. The first half of the twenty-first century had been cruel years for the British agrobusiness sector; even harsher if taken in combination with the decline in population and the consequent housing surplus. As a result, the drop-outs of the forties and fifties were able to take their pick from among the gutted shells of once fine farmhouses. They chose the best and moved in, squatted in the derelict outbuildings, planted their seeds and tended their flocks and practiced their DIY skills, until a generation later a mansion fit for a squire stood in lonely isolation alongside a decaying road where no more cars drove. Or rather, it would have taken a generation had there been any children against whose lives it could be measured; these were the latter decades of the population crash, and what a previous century would have labelled downshifter dink couples were now in the majority, far outnumbering any breeder colonies. In this aspect of their life, Joe and Maddie were boringly conventional. In other respects they weren’t: Maddie’s nightmares, her aversion to alcohol, and her withdrawl from society were all relics of her time in Peaceforce. As for Joe, he liked it here. Hated cities, hated the net, hated the burn of the new. Anything for a quiet life…
The Pig and Pizzle, on the outskirts of Outer Cheswick, was the only pub within about ten kilometres—certainly the only one within staggering distance for Joe when he’d had a skinful of mild—and it was naturally a seething den of local gossip, not least because Ole Brenda refused to allow electricity, much less bandwidth, into the premises. (This was not out of any sense of misplaced technophobia, but a side effect of Brenda’s previous life as an attack hacker with the European Defense Forces.)
Joe paused at the bar. “Pint of bitter?” he asked tentatively. Brenda glanced at him and nodded, then went back to loading the antique washing machine. Presently she pulled a clean glass down from the shelf and held it under the tap.
“Hear you’ve got farm trouble,” she said non-commitally as she worked the hand pump on the beer engine.
“Uh-huh.” Joe focussed on the glass. “Where’d you hear that?”