The Long Utopia Read Online Free PDF

some day to wear them for a couple of months. And it was baby shoes that Nikos was particularly looking for today, for the benefit of Angie Clayton’s unborn.
    After some rummaging he found a pair of beautiful little moccasins sewn from the scraped hide of some unfortunate furball, shoes that sat on the palm of his hand like toys.
    That was when he heard Rio yelp, and a sound like wood cracking, and a rush like a heavy mass falling into a hole.

4
    N IKOS DASHED OUTSIDE and ran around the house, the way his dog had gone. ‘Rio! Rio!’
    At the back of the house, facing uncleared jungle, a row of poles had been driven into the ground, a half-finished stockade, intended to keep sheep in and big birds out. Nikos pushed his way through the tea plants and saplings that choked the once-cleared space between house and stockade – and he almost fell into a hole in the ground.
    He took a cautious step back and peered down. The hole was maybe six feet across, and had been covered by rough-cut planks of wood that had evidently softened, made rotten by time. He could see from the remaining planks that they had been buried under soil, with a heaping of forest mulch on top of that. There were even a few hardy ferns sprouting in that skim of earth. But one of the planks had broken now, and fallen into the hole, revealing a deep black space.
    Nikos scratched his head. The whole thing was kind of puzzling. Was this a cellar? It could be. As well as a place to store food and other stuff, a cellar was a sensible precaution against attack by bandits and others with nefarious purposes. If you had a Stepper box no wall could keep you out, after all; you just needed to step sideways into a world where that wall didn’t exist, walk through the location of the wall, and step back again . . . Nobody could step into a cellar, however. Not with the same location in neighbouringworlds blocked off by soil and bedrock and tree roots. There were even shallow cellars under some of Nikos’s family’s larger, better established encampments, dotted stepwise across the worlds.
    Yes, you’d expect a house like this to have a cellar, or at least the beginnings of one. But why plank it over?
    And while all this crud on top of the planks might have just gathered there with the years, it looked like the hole had been deliberately concealed. Why hide it? Was it actually some kind of trap, rather than a cellar? But a trap for what? Only a big bird or a croc, or a big dog like Rio, or a human , would have been heavy enough to smash through those planks – and maybe not at all, back when the planks weren’t so far-gone rotten as they were now.
    None of this mattered. Rio was missing.
    He hesitated, there in the unshaded sunshine. Enclosure underground would be even worse than in the Poulson house, because his primary defence, stepping out of any danger, wouldn’t be available to him. He nearly backed away. But Rio . . . Carried all the way from Datum Earth as a pup by a trader, she was a Bernese mountain dog, bred, it was said, to pull carts laden with cheese. She was strong, with good lungs, but slow.
    She was Nikos’s dog. If he had to climb down into this hole he would.
    He got down on his hands and knees, cautiously, and peered into the hole, through the broken plank. All he saw was darkness, even when he shone in his flashlight.
    ‘Rio!’
    At first he heard nothing at all, not even an echo. Then came a bark, undoubtedly Rio’s, from out of the hole – but it sounded remarkably far off – not like it was from a dog trapped just a few feet down. ‘Rio! Rio! . . .’
    And then he heard another sound. A kind of scraping, almost a whispering, like some huge insect. It seemed to move away, as if burrowing deeper down. All the legends and scare stories in hishead came bubbling back to the surface. Again, he almost backed off. But his dog was down there.
    Feverishly he began to pull away the remaining planks, carelessly tipping dirt into the hole. ‘Rio!