Free The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett Page A

what he preferred. And as winches whirred, drawing the twain steadily down its anchor cables towards the ground, Ben jumped up and down, excited.
    ‘Of course they’d come over,’ Sally Linsay said, standing beside Agnes. ‘That’s what folk do. Check out the newcomer. Welcome you, if possible. Make sure you’re no threat, if necessary.’
    ‘Hmph. And if we are?’
    ‘Folk out here have ways of dealing with stuff,’ Sally said quietly. ‘Just remember, this is a big world. Almost all of it choked with jungle, just like this, or thicker. And only a handful of settlements. An easy place to lose problems.’
    ‘You make an empty world sound almost claustrophobic.’
    ‘These are good people, as people go. I wouldn’t have advised you to come here otherwise.’
    But Sally said this with a kind of amused lilt in her voice, a lilt that had been there from the beginning, when she’d been approached for advice by Lobsang. (Or rather, she was approached by George, Agnes reminded herself, George ; he was George Abrahams now and for ever, and she was not Sister Agnes but Mrs Agnes Abrahams, George’s faithful wife. And little Ben was no longer an Ogilvy but an Abrahams too; they had the adoption papers to say so – signed and dated in this year 2054, having waited so many years until the authorities, horribly overstretched in the continuing post-Yellowstone disruption, had finally approved a child for them to cherish . . .)
    Sally had known Lobsang a long time, and she had been somewhat bemused by his choice of a new lifestyle. ‘Lobsang’s having a son? The farming, OK. The cat I can understand. Of course he’d bring Shi-mi. Lobsang and his damn cat. But – a son ?’
    Agnes had protested, ‘Ben’s orphaned. We will be able to give him a better life than—’
    ‘Lobsang wants a son ?’
    ‘Lobsang is recovering, Sally. From a kind of breakdown, I think.’
    ‘Oh, I wasn’t so surprised about that. I suppose he was kind of unique: an antique AI, lots of technological generations all piled up on top of each other. We never ran an experiment like Lobsang before. Complex systems can just crash, from ecologies to economies . . . But most complex systems don’t come out of it wanting to play happy families.’
    ‘Don’t be unkind, Sally. He has always served mankind in his way, but from a distance. Now he wants to apprehend humanity more fully. He wants to be human. So we’re going to live in a regular human community, as anonymously as we can. We’re even going to fake illness, ageing—’
    ‘He already faked his own death.’
    ‘That was different—’
    ‘I was at the funeral! Agnes, Lobsang’s not human. He’s Daneel Olivaw! And he wants a son ?’
    There was no talking to her. As far as Agnes could tell Sally had given the matter of her recommendation of a future home for the family conscientious thought. Indeed there were already people living here, in New Springfield, apparently happy and healthy. And yet, why was it that Sally always found the whole project so funny? Even now, the moment they arrived here, as if she was hiding some kind of personal joke?
    Lobsang came bustling into the cabin. Locked into the ambulant unit to be known as George Abrahams, he looked in his late fifties or maybe older, with sparse grey hair, a beard hiding much of his blandly handsome face, his skin tanned. He wore a checked shirt and jeans, and even now it was a jolt for Agnes to see him no longer in the orange robes of a Buddhist monk. He said, ‘Well, we’re down. I’ll go unpack the coffee pot before the neighbours get here.’
    First impressions were always important. Agnes practised her own welcoming smile, working her cheeks, feeling her lips stretch.
    Sally was watching her cynically. ‘Not bad. If I didn’t know you were a sock puppet too—’
    ‘Thank you, Sally.’
    So Agnes, holding Ben’s hand, clambered down a short step from the grounded gondola and took her first footsteps on this new world,