Free The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett

‘Not far now, old friend.’
    Nelson smiled ruefully. ‘I’m glad to have made the trip.’
    ‘And I’m glad you did too. You always were good company. And you always made me think.’
    ‘Ouch. Even on your birthday? My deep apologies.’ He glanced sideways at Joshua. ‘Of course, for most of us such occasions mean family and friends. I myself lost contact with my own family in the chaos of the Johannesburg townships, long before Yellowstone. And here you are, Joshua, wandering alone – well, almost alone – on such a significant anniversary.’
    Joshua shrugged. ‘I am more domesticated now. Even Sally admits that. But, you know – sometimes I miss the alien. The beagles for instance.’ Dog-like sapients from a very remote Earth. ‘Life gets boring with only humans to talk to.’
    ‘I thought it was a beagle that chewed off your left hand.’
    ‘Nobody’s perfect. And he thought he was doing me a favour. As for the rest – well, I do seem to have had trouble building a family.’
    ‘Perhaps because you did not come from a family yourself,’ Nelson said seriously. ‘Lobsang told me your story, long ago. Your mother, poor Maria Valienté, who gave birth to you alone, and died aged just fifteen. Your father – quite unknown. Of course you were cherished by Agnes and the Sisters at the Home, but that could only be a partial recompense for such a loss, even if you were never really aware of it.’
    ‘Lobsang did find out something about my mother.’ And had given him one treasured relic, a monkey bracelet, a silly toy belonging to the kid Maria had been when she’d given birth to him . . . ‘Nothing about my father, though.’
    Nelson frowned, looking into the distance. ‘Which is rather unusual, if you think about it.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean that if even Lobsang couldn’t find anything, there must have been deliberate concealment. By somebody, somehow, for some reason.’ He grinned. ‘I’m suddenly intrigued, Joshua. Thisis the kind of puzzle that has always attracted me. I found Lobsang himself by following a research trail, you know – even though it turned out that he had engineered the whole thing. And since Lobsang has gone, my world has been rather depleted of conspiracy theories.’
    Joshua studied him. ‘You’re thinking of researching this, aren’t you?’
    Nelson patted his arm, and stiffly got to his feet. ‘Shall we make some more progress? The many candles on that birthday cake won’t blow themselves out.’
    ‘True enough.’
    ‘The many, many candles—’
    ‘I get it, Nelson.’
    ‘Hmm. But would you like me to follow this up? This business of your father. Think of it as another birthday present. If you would rather I didn’t—’
    Joshua forced himself not to hesitate. ‘Do it.’
    ‘And if I do find something – considering the circumstances of Maria’s brief life, it could be distressing. One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’
    ‘Well, I’m a grown-up, Nelson.’ But he did remember how much Lobsang’s revelations about his mother had confounded him. ‘Look, I’ll trust your judgement, whatever you find. On my count, one, two—’
    They winked stepwise together, with pops of displaced air.

9
    E VEN AS THE airship dropped its anchor at the summit of the low hill that dominated the heart of New Springfield, in a stepwise-parallel version of Maine on Earth West 1,217,756, Agnes could see the neighbours coming to call. She felt oddly nervous, as if she had stage fright. This was the moment her new life would begin, she thought, in this late summer of the year 2054 – nine full years after Lobsang’s ‘death’ – in her new home, with these new people.
    Ben, three years old, could see the neighbours coming too. If he stood tall and held on to the rail with his chubby hands, he could just about look out of the gondola’s big observation windows without being lifted up, and being an independent little boy that was