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.’

Agnes prompted, ‘But the farming didn’t stick.’

‘No. Now there’s a bunch of us spread out over the stepwise worlds. We do have homes, you see, but they’re scattered around, seasonal. We work together to maintain the farms for the sheep, the potatoes, a few chickens and such. And we have a kind of rota for when to meet up, for events like this. The rest of the time we just wander. We’re not combers, by the way! Oliver takes offence if you call him that.’

‘I get it. Just an easier life than farming.’

‘Well, that’s the idea. These worlds are so rich, why do our kids need to break their backs behind a plough? But,’ she said hastily, ‘what we choose isn’t for everybody. And it’s not to say you won’t make a go of your farm, if that’s what you want. To each his own.’

‘That’s a good philosophy.’

‘I mean, you’ll fit right in. If you do grow wheat and stuff we’ll be happy to trade for it.’ Marina sipped her lemonade. ‘And that little boy of yours looks like he’ll grow up big and strong, like his … father?’

Agnes suppressed a smile; the probe couldn’t have been less subtle. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard this already. Ben’s not ours. He’s adopted.’

‘I did hear something – people gossip, you know. But I didn’t want to go supposing about something you might not want to tell me about.’

‘It’s best to be open,’ and Agnes felt a stab of Catholic conscience even as those words emerged from her own disguised ambulant-unit artificial mouth. ‘His real name’s Ogilvy, by the way – just in case something happens to us, and he ever needs to know.’

Marina nodded. ‘I understand. I’ll remember.’

‘Ben lost his parents early. They were both workers on a beanstalk – a space elevator, you know? On Earth West 17. They were in a kind of mobile workshop, outside the atmosphere. There was a leak, a decompression. The kind of accident that would have been entirely impossible a generation ago, if you think about it.

‘Their little boy ended up in a kids’ home where I used to work. But George and I were already looking to come out to a place like this, and it turned out that Ben’s parents had been planning to save their money and leave their jobs behind and strike out on their own in the same kind of way. And we thought, why not give Ben the life his parents intended for him? So we applied for adoption …’

And Lobsang, behind the scenes, in the final stages of their desperate wait, had bent a whole slew of rules, while Agnes had gone through agonies of doubt about whether she, a robot, could be a fit and suitable mother-surrogate for a three-year-old boy.

‘Well, here you are,’ Marina said. She clinked her lemonade glass against Agnes’s. ‘And I for one am glad to meet you. I’m sure you’ll get along fine, all three of you.’

‘Four including the cat,’ Agnes said with a smile. ‘Thank you, Marina.’

‘Listen, we have an Easter egg hunt. Dawn, the day after tomorrow.’

‘An Easter egg hunt?’

‘Just what we call it. And I know it’s not Easter. Come along and see. Now then, we can’t let those men of ours have all the fun out there …’

11

THE DAY OF the Easter egg hunt was only Agnes’s fifth in the forest.

It was an early start. As Marina had said, the hunt was supposed to get going at dawn of this late summer’s day. Farmer’s wife Agnes was already getting used to rising early.

But she woke feeling woozy, oddly disoriented.

Her artificial body needed the food and drink she consumed, extracting various biochemical necessities. And it was programmed to deliver what felt like an authentic interval of sleep every night, complete with artfully simulated dreams. She would have insisted on such features if they hadn’t already been designed in: how could you even remotely consider yourself human if you didn’t eat, didn’t sleep? And after sixteen years in this new body and after various upgrades of the hardware and software, she knew herself well enough by now to understand that this peculiar feeling was nothing to do with having to get up at dawn, or with the unfamiliar food she’d eaten since arriving here, or even the moonshine she’d partaken of at the barn dance. No, this was more like jet lag: a modern-life nasty that she’d always been vulnerable to, and she had always avoided long-distance journeys as a result. Or it was like the kind of mild disorientation she got even when a local time zone changed the clocks by an hour.