Free The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett Page B

her home. At least the weather was good, the blue sky all but clear of cloud save for a few peculiar east-west streaks. And a half moon, too, hung silver in the eastern sky, as if to welcome them. This hilltop had evidently once been cleared but then abandoned; the trees here were young, saplings sprouting amid the squat stumps of fallen giants. Abandoned houses stood around, half-built and watchful. Lobsang’s plan was that they would take over one ofthese big old houses and fix it up as their own, use these half-cleared fields for their own crops.
    The cat, Shi-mi, scampered down the step, stretched luxuriously in the sunlight, and said, ‘Oh, how glorious to be free!’
    Agnes turned on her. ‘Remember the golden rule, you plastic flea-bucket. No talking! Here you’re a cat, a whole cat and nothing but a cat – as far as Ben’s concerned, and everybody else. Also you’re over twenty years old. Act your age.’
    ‘Yes, Agnes.’ The cat was slim, white, healthy-looking, with eyes that glowed green, a little eerily. Her liquid female-human voice came from a small loudspeaker in her belly. ‘I’ll be good, I promise. It’s just that it’s such a relief to have nothing to do, now that I’ve retired from my Navy career with Maggie Kauffman. And now to discover what equivalent of mice and rats inhabit this glorious new world . . .’ She darted away into the green.
    Ben laughed with delight in the warm late-morning sunshine, and immediately went running off too, into undergrowth that was waist-high for him. Agnes had anticipated this; he’d been the same at every stop they’d made on the way out here. ‘Don’t go out of sight, mind, Ben.’
    ‘OK, Ag-ness.’
    Lobsang/George, meanwhile, was already working at the gondola, loosening the bolts and latches that fixed it to the twain envelope’s internal skeleton. The gondola was a brick-shaped block of ceramics and aluminium the size of a mobile home, suspended under a twain envelope two hundred feet long, and was designed to be detached and left behind. Sally, alongside him, was operating controls to draw down some of the envelope’s helium, the lift gas, into pressurized chambers, so the ship wouldn’t waft away into the air as soon as the weight of the gondola was gone.
    The plan was that Sally would pilot the rump of the ship back to its Black Corporation dry dock on a Low Earth. The grounded gondola meanwhile would serve as a temporary shelter for Lobsangand his ‘family’ in their first days, weeks, months here. It contained tools, seed stock, medical gear and vitamin supplements, pots and pans for the kitchen – even animals, including chickens and young goats and a couple of pregnant sows – everything they needed for a flying start at this new game of pioneering. Also the gondola held a few secrets that would have to remain hidden from the neighbours, locked behind blue doors, such as a workshop for their ambulant android bodies, including a small gel manufactory and a nanotech-based cosmetic facility which would enable George and Agnes to appear to ‘age’ naturally. There was even a kennel-sized workshop for the maintenance of the cat.
    Lobsang, even in his alter ego as George Abrahams, had had the contacts at the Black Corporation to get all this built. ‘We don’t have to ride in on a mule through Death Pass,’ he’d said. ‘We don’t have to rough it. There’s nothing wrong with using the benefits of our past civilization, as we start anew. And besides we’ll have a little boy with us, remember? A roof over our heads when it rains on the first night will be a good thing . . .’
    Maybe it was all necessary, Agnes thought, but she did wonder what kind of impression this gleaming structure was making on their new neighbours, who struck her as a ragged-looking lot as they continued up the trail to this hilltop. But she could see that the children were already entranced by the animals, most of them still inside the gondola: the sheep, the