Morag took her walking stick and set out on the Portmeirion Road. Portmeirion was behind her and she was walking back towards Pen-y-Groes, so she supposed she should call it the Pen-y-Groes Road. But Portmeirion, with all its beautiful, seductive, glittering towers, loomed over the landscape like the spoil heaps from the abandoned slate mines, so the Portmeirion Road it was. Both ways.

---

It had been three days earlier that she’d taken her walking stick and her robot and set out in the other direction, from her farm towards the sea coast. And almost a fortnight earlier that she’d had the conversation with her adopted brother Zeb and his husband Dai about one of the orphans in their care, Maya.

“She almost didn’t make it this time,” Zeb had said to Morag when she’d arrived, and after she’d had a cheery but worried visit with the girl, white-faced but smiling bravely from a bed full of quilts under an attic window. “Every time she has one of these attacks, I worry it’s going to be the last one.”

“The doctor did all right,” Morag stirred her cup of tea. Outside, in the yard of Zeb and Dai’s brewery, her robot, Seamus, was playing a game of football with a few of the other orphans, and she could hear the delighted, incredulous shrieks every time the robot did something particularly unexpected with its six skinny digitigrade legs.

“The doctor’s doing the best she can with what she’s got,” Dai said. “But it’s not like it was when we were kids, when you could get inhalers and medications for asthmatics.” He paused, realizing he was about to go into more difficult territory. “And other things.”

Morag didn’t say anything. She and Zeb were both remembering when their mother had died. Her long, last illness. And Morag’s father railing at Morag for lack of anyone better to shout at, about how ten, twenty years ago they could have taken her to a hospital, gotten chemotherapy, radiotherapy, lots of things ending in -therapy.

As if it was Morag’s fault that things had gone the way they did.

Morag herself felt the lack more and more as she got older. Twinges that might eventually turn into arthritis, worries about her bone density and other things that people talked about a lot when she was small. Sometimes at night she’d wake up with horrible fears about what would happen if she couldn’t run the farm anymore.

But then she would tell herself that it would go to one of the orphans who took an interest in farming, or one of the neighbors’ children, and she would move to Zeb and Dai’s brewery. She could carry on fixing up old tech as well there as anywhere. And she could pass her knowledge on to any of the kids who wanted it. Whatever her father had said in anger all those years ago, the world wasn’t a primitive wasteland where life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Some, including Morag’s mother herself, had also criticized the way doctors back in the day had focused on keeping people alive at all costs, at making everyone “Young and Beautiful”. Age, even death, weren’t things to be feared.

Pain was, of course, but that was what cannabis was for.

“The irony is that she’s the one likely to actually have a career as a doctor, if she makes it to adulthood.” Zeb passed a plate of biscuits.

“I thought you said that wasn’t going too well?” Morag took one.

“It isn’t,” Dai said, though Zeb gave him a cross look for it. “Well, it isn’t. We apprenticed her to the doctor, but the doctor says she’s got appalling bedside manner and doesn’t want to learn anything in the doctoring line. Just way too fascinated with what makes people sick. Always asking really embarrassing questions, wanting to cut things open or poke at them. Even experimenting with her own airflow, trying different concoctions to see if they improve her breathing.”

“I think that’s the problem,” Dai said. “In another time and place, maybe she’d be a scientist. But she can’t be.”

“She could go to Portmeirion,” Zeb quipped.

“You know,” Morag said, “that’s not a bad idea.”

“What? Portmeirion?”

“For what’s wrong with her. One of us could go and see if they know anything that might help.”

“That’s—” Dai went from abrupt denial to acceptance. “Not a bad idea, actually. I mean, the cheesemaker in Borth-y-Gest has got some fantastic old recipes from them, and the archive came in very handy when we needed to improve our beer cask design to get through the winters. They’re not just about stories and entertainment.”

“But would they have anything that would help with chronic lung disease?” Zeb looked skeptical.

Morag shrugged. “They’ve got all sorts of things in that archive of theirs. It’s worth a try. Half a day’s walk from here, and the planting’s nearly done so I’ll soon have time on my hands. I’ll take Seamus for protection.”

Seamus had started out as a security walkbot of some kind, though Morag had never been sure if the fused lump on its anterior had held a camera or a gun. Even without that, she’d seen Seamus take down a grown man simply using the aluminum claws on its limbs. And from the sour look on Dai’s face, he remembered too.

“You could stay with the glassblower there,” Zeb said. “Nancy. We know her, we could give you a letter of introduction.”

Dai laughed. “She doesn’t need a letter of introduction,” he said. “Everyone hereabouts knows Morag.”

---

Morag accepted the compliment, but she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. A lot of local people did know her, because she was the lady who found and fixed up old tech. A useful person to go to if you had an old-fashioned washing machine that needed repairing, or had an idea for a postal service using refurbished drones. The local kids all liked Seamus. The nomadic tribes traded with her for things she found up on the spoil heap behind the abandoned slate mine. But she certainly didn’t think anyone would know her in Portmeirion.

Even though it was close by, she’d never been there in person. Once upon a time, it had been a holiday resort, where rich people could come and stay by the sea in its quirky Italian-style cottages and hotels. When times got bad, the rich people stopped coming, and the company that ran it quietly disappeared.

It might have become an interesting ruin, but for what happened next.

“A big car turned up with some Southern types,” Nancy said to Morag, as Morag earned her keep by fixing the temperature gauge on the kiln. Seamus, meanwhile, trotted around the outside of Nancy’s cottage, scouting the perimeter for threats. “Not a big car as in fancy, but a big car as in big, yes? There were some fishing families that had moved into the cottages on the coast, so the newcomers went to them. Said they were history professors, from a university that had got into trouble. They needed a place to live and to keep their archive. So could they live in the village?” Nancy shrugged. “Of course, they said yes.”

Morag nodded. There’d been a period when a lot of refugees straggled up from the South or the East and moved into houses no one was using. Some hadn’t taken to farming and had moved on. Some had joined the nomads. The rest, Morag didn’t ask about. But a few of them had integrated into the community, and that was just fine.

“On the whole, it was a good decision,” Nancy said. “They set up their archive in the big old hotel on the edge of the village, moved into the cottages. More of them came. Economists, physicists. Literature specialists. Biologists. All of them bringing books and things for the archive. So, other people moved in around them.”

“People like you.”

Nancy nodded. “A lot of specialist craftspeople. There’s me, there’s a whole lot of potters. There’s a rugmaker. There’s a weekly market for food, and there’s a shop. The archivists buy their food and goods from the local people, they don’t actually make anything. Anything physical, that is.”

Nancy didn’t have to elaborate. Everyone knew what the archivists made, and how they were able to pay for the goods they bought.

They made stories. Stories from the archive. They also collected stories, from anyone who came their way with something to share. Sometimes funny ones, sometimes sad ones, mostly complicated ones. Sometimes those stories had an obvious practical use, for instance some of the fishers did a few experiments after reading some things in the archive about oxygen levels in the water and crustacean health, and this had improved the shrimp population tremendously. However, the people in the area understood that practical value wasn’t the only value, so the stories in general were what people got from Portmeirion.

“They’ve even got their own nomads now.” Morag nodded; this wasn’t news to her. They called themselves The Unmutuals, and rumor had it the core group had been disgruntled graduate students. But they roved the wooded hills above Portmeirion, just like the Children of Flame did near where she lived, living off the land and keeping dangers from reaching the village.

“But mostly people come here because they want information,” Nancy concluded. She handed Morag a mug of tea with goats’ milk, and Morag put down her tools and took it. With a click of metal on slate, Seamus came in the open workshop door, folded its legs, and went into standby mode. “I assume that’s what brings you here?”

Morag nodded. She briefly explained about young Maya, and her lung troubles.

“Local doctor thinks it’s asthma,” Morag said. “Chronic lung disease. Back when I was little, there were medicines that could keep asthma under control. They were common enough, but as far as I know there isn’t an easy substitute.” Archive or no, people had figured out a lot of workarounds for common drugs. Which plants were painkillers, which ones were blood-thinners and which blood-clotters, which ones were antidepressants.

But some things were harder to replace, and some impossible.

“And of course you have knowledge to trade back.” Nancy said. “I’d heard you were able to fix anything with a microchip, and to judge by that temperature gauge, it’s true.”

Morag looked modest. “It’s not exactly true. But I might know something they don’t.”

“When are you going to see them?”

“In the letter they sent me, they said they’ll meet me at nine tomorrow.”

Nancy nodded. “They’re a little full of themselves,” she said, “but they’re only people. And they do want to help.”

---

Morag wasn’t the sort to wonder too much about cryptic statements, so she turned up to her appointment at the appropriate time, Seamus beside her.

Wandering into the village, Morag looked around at the charming, bright cottages. Domed roofs and red, yellow, and blue paint. Little cherubs. Windows appearing where you didn’t expect them. A huge bronze statue of a nearly-naked man holding the world on his shoulders.

Keep it in perspective, Morag thought. They’re beautiful houses, but they’re still houses like any other.

Nonetheless, for all Nancy’s reassuring words yesterday about how the archivists were only people and wanted to help, Morag felt a little uncomfortably as if impressions were being managed. As if the people in the village wanted to give an impression of cheery luxury, of living better than others.

Morag told herself not to be uncharitable. But she glanced at Seamus, its battered and scratched white shell and the ugly black lump at the front, its sheer ordinariness, just for reassurance.

Morag, following the instructions in her letter, eventually found her way to a building with a green dome. It had a self-important look and Morag steeled herself for more of this impression management. But when the doors opened, it was by a cheerful-looking red-headed round-faced woman half Morag’s age, wearing a sort of long jacket that looked like she’d just thrown it on.

“You’re Morag!” the woman said. She stuck her hand out and grinned. “I’m Saiorse. We’ve all been wanting to meet you for some time. So glad you finally came.”

Morag was a little nonplussed at the cheer. “You could have come down to the farm any time,” she said, taking the proffered hand.

Saiorse frowned, as if that had only just occurred to her. “So we could! So we could! But most of us don’t really like to travel. We want to stay near the archives. Make sure they’re okay.”

“They’re just things,” Morag found herself saying, then cursed herself for being rude.

“Yes,” Saiorse said. “But they’re important things. Would you like to see them?”

“Do we have time?”

“Oh yes,” Saiorse said. “The chief archivists will be down in the archive anyway. Come and see.”

---

Listening to Saiorse’s easy chatter, Morag found herself relaxing. The morning sun was warm, and small groups of archivists were sitting around the village green, some reading, some talking with each other. Down by the seashore a tall man was animatedly talking to a group of what appeared to be students.

“Where do you get students?” she asked Saiorse.

“Some come in from the villages. Some from the tribes,” Saiorse said. “Usually, when there’s a kid who’s better suited to abstract brain-work, either they run away from home and come here, or their people send them on.”

Morag thought of Maya. And she glanced sideways at Saoirse. She was too young to have come up with the original archivists. How had she come here? What was her story?

Morag followed her into the big white building that housed the main archives. She wandered among aisles of books, gray card boxes of old paper, glass bottles with squid and sharks and strange bleached-white mammals with flat ears and bulbous eyes.

Then there was the room with all the old tech.

Here, cataloged in order, the work Morag had done all her life fell into place. She saw a set of boxes the size of a wardrobe that, once she’d sorted out in her head which part was which, were clearly the same thing as the insides of a tablet: read-only memory and storage and display. She saw, over time, those boxes shrinking, becoming suitcases and then tiles. She saw paper diagrams for drones and mowers, the things she’d worked out how to fit together in three dimensions outlined in two.

“I thought you’d like that bit,” Saoirse smiled. Then, “I’m afraid this section’s not as complete or comprehensive of the others. That’s why we wanted to talk to you.”

“You,” Morag said, “wanted to talk to me?”

“Well, yes, you’re the expert,” Saoirse said.

“I’m an expert,” Morag said, but she still couldn’t help but feeling a little proud. She knew people generally appreciated what she did, but mostly it was in a backhanded sort of way. Like her talent was useful but a little bit strange, a little uncanny, and then there was that robot. It wasn’t just that she’d been born in Scotland: there were Irish in the village, and Poles, and Tunisians. Zeb and his sibling Casey had been born in California, and had integrated into the local landscape much more closely than she ever had.

So she had to admit it was a nice feeling to have someone talk about what she did in unmitigatedly positive terms.

“Time to meet the senior archivists!” Saoirse said cheerily. She opened a door to a room and ushered Morag in. Seamus followed, trotting a quick perimeter before retreating to a corner.

It didn’t go into power-down mode, Morag noticed, and it was in a defensible position, in a corner with its back covered. Its claws still retracted, but poised to extend. She didn’t anthropomorphize the robot, but she could tell when it was, for lack of a better word, apprehensive.

Seamus’ type of robot was a guard, was programmed to recognize subtle cues of body language that even humans sometimes missed. To identify and target the leaders of a group, but also to recognize danger before it happens.

There were three senior archivists. Two men, one woman. The room was whitewashed, and had the sort of furniture that had been ordinary when Morag was young: a table made of wood chips laminated together with a plastic coating fused over it, chairs made of bent metal tubes with PVC seats. But the table, though well cared for, was old and smooth, and the PVC had been replaced with leather in places.

The archivists were Morag’s age or older. But healthy-looking. Like people who got a decent amount of exercise, even if they weren’t tanned and calloused like most older people in the area. They were wearing the same plain long jackets as Saoirse and everyone else; there weren’t any badges or special clothes to mark them out as higher status. Under the jackets, simple work clothes, shirts, and trousers like everyone else.

One of the men stood. “Morag,” he said, extending his hand. “Very pleased to meet you. I’m John; this is Alec, and this is Aresu.”

That was the woman. “I’m from London,” she said, almost apologizing for it.

“Good for you,” Morag said, accepting hands and shaking them. Everyone sat down, with Saoirse finding a chair by the window, out of the way of the main line of conversation but still present. Also, Morag thought, a defensible position. “You have a very nice archive,” she said, feeling she ought to say something nice about it. “Very . . . comprehensive.”

Alec nodded. “The general idea is to have a repository of all the useful arts, sciences and histories,” he said. He had a beard that seemed to be making up for his hairline, Morag thought, perhaps a little unkindly. John had very dark, very smooth skin, and crooked teeth. Aresu had big, black eyebrows that made her look like she was frowning even when, as now, she was smiling.

“I’ve come about my niece, Maya.” Morag decided to get straight to the point. “She has asthma. She has bad attacks that put her in bed for days, and every time she catches a cold she gets a chest infection. We’re worried that one of these days she’ll have an attack that will kill her. There used to be drugs that could treat asthma. They used to be common. I want to know if there’s anything in your archive about how to make them, or something like them.”

The senior archivists sat back and spoke quietly among themselves. Morag felt like she’d wandered into a myth or fairy tale. Like she was asking the three gray ladies how to defeat Medusa.

The archivists turned back. Morag had the feeling they’d already agreed a plan of action, and the supposed discussion had just been for effect. “We might be able to give you what you want,” Aresu said, “but we want something in exchange.”

Of course they did. So far, so fairy-tale. “What?” Morag asked.

“Your robot.”

Morag felt as though she’d been punched.

On the face of it, a not unreasonable thing for them to ask for. They didn’t have one, and, although it would make her life less easy to have one, it could presumably make life much easier for other people if they knew how to make them. And, given the knowledge she’d built up since finding it, she could maybe even build another out of the scraps on the spoil heap.

But she felt as if she’d been punched.

“It’s not mine to give,” she said.

“Inasmuch as it belongs to anyone, it belongs to you,” John said. “You found the robot, up on the spoil heap. It’s yours.”

Morag shook her head. “It’s not. Any more than a sheep belongs to a farmer. Farmers care for animals. But they don’t own them.”

“Don’t they?” John said. “Do the sheep volunteer to be sheared? Butchered?”

“The farmer makes decisions for them,” Morag said. “He’s a steward. But the sheep belong to themselves.” Morag couldn’t think of the last time she’d heard of someone selling a sheep. Mutton, yes, and skins and wool and bones, but never a living animal. And then there had been Naomi the postmistress, who’d had a problem with a trio of sheep who kept breaking into her garden and eating the shoots. She’d penned them up and told the farmer to come get them, but the farmer didn’t, and now she was stuck with a trio of sheep. “You can give them away, but if they don’t want to stay given, you can’t keep them.”

“If that’s the law around here, then that’s interesting,” Alec said. “We can talk about it some time. But the question then becomes, is Seamus an animal? Or is it an object, a tool?”

Morag felt her teeth grinding. She’d always carefully schooled herself against anthropomorphizing the robot. At reminding herself that it wasn’t an animal, that it didn’t have feelings in the way that humans and sheep and dogs did. And yet. It might have a different intelligence, but it had an intelligence. It could clearly feel analogs to fear—an alert state, an awareness of danger—and contentment—since after all, it could leave the farm, but never did.

There was danger in anthropomorphizing. There was also danger in othering, in denying that something different to humans had dignity and intelligence.

“Seamus and its kind are killers,” she said. “Do you really want to have the knowledge of how to build killer machines in your archive?”

Alec spread his hands. “And asthma is gradually being eliminated from the human population,” he countered. “It’s gone from a common illness to one that’s almost unknown. Some of that might well be down to the lack of availability of treatment drugs.”

“So the people who have it die and don’t pass on their genes.”

“It’s probably a more complicated combination of factors, having to do with cleaner air and different early childhood lifestyles,” Alec said, “but yes, there’s probably that.”

Morag felt actual tears prickling against her eyelids. “I thought you were here to help,” she said.

All three archivists’ faces dropped into identical expressions of concern. “We are,” John said. “And if we had the information readily available, we’d give it to you. But we don’t. We’d have to look through the archive. Find the information. And figure out how to use it. Just knowing that a particular substance is needed, doesn’t tell you how to get it or how to make it available for human consumption.”

“And you’re asking me to give up Seamus, for a process?”

“You don’t have to give up Seamus,” Aresu said.

Morag’s internal train suddenly derailed. “What?”

“Come here,” Aresu said. “Study Seamus. And other machines too, if you want. But you could make a place here just studying the one robot. Writing about it, what it does. How it started out, how it developed.”

“You could live here,” John said. “Be one of us.”

“An archivist?” Morag scoffed. But she had to admit the idea felt tempting. She liked her work with machines. And considering how difficult work could sometimes get on the farm, even with help, the idea of being someplace where she could just work with the robots, study the robots, sounded like a holiday.

“This is what we’re doing right now,” John said. “We can’t just leave the archive as a static record of life before. We’ve been recruiting people in the community.”

“Scientists? Historians?”

“In a sense. Fishers. Farmers. Craftspeople. Storytellers. Anyone who’d be willing to stay with us for a few years, or many. Archive what they do and how they do it.”

“A few years, or many?”

“However long they want. Some come and go. Others stay longer.”

Morag glanced back at Seamus. It was still in suspicious mode.

“What would happen to Seamus after I leave?” Or die, she thought.

“It would stay here.”

“What if it doesn’t want to?” Thinking of the sheep.

The archivists looked mildly impatient. “Why wouldn’t it?” Aresu said. “We’d look after it, care for it in the way that you tell us to do. Do you think it would be better off wandering the hills? Or laboring on a farm?”

Morag hadn’t really given much thought as to what would happen to Seamus when she died. She knew that most of the robots of Seamus’ cohort had gone wandering off into the hills and towns, most ending up as frozen sculptures in gardens or being harvested for useful parts on spoil heaps. She’d done her own share of harvesting. Seamus had been unusual precisely because he was still walking.

But her mind also flashed to the tech store in the archive. Imagined Seamus standing still on a pedestal, next to the computers and the drones. Like the taxidermied animals in the other room.

“Think about what we’re offering,” Alec said. “Look around the village. We’d be offering a home for you and a chance to study robots. And we’d be able to help your niece. Maybe not immediately, but we’d find something that would help.”

“And what if there’s nothing that can help?”

“That’s the risk you’d have to take,” Aresu said. “If you do, maybe we can’t help her. But if you don’t, then we definitely can’t.”

---

At the edge of Portmeirion there was a concrete platform where you could sit and watch the sea. The railing was freshly painted and the concrete was lovingly maintained, but Morag could see the cracks.

She sat cross-legged and watched the sun set and the tide go out. A group of fishers sat on the sand flats, mending nets. Another group, this one archivists to judge by their plain long jackets, were gathered around a sextant, measuring something, and talking companionably to each other. Some small children were running around the edge of the waves, playing a game that involved throwing stones into the water. A small dog ran alongside them, barking furiously. Morag couldn’t see parents in attendance, so assumed they felt safe leaving their children to run around the beach on their own.

“They don’t have a bad life here,” Morag said to Seamus, who was in power-saving mode a few feet away.

Could she give up Seamus? Knowing that not to do so would mean cutting off one more avenue for Maya? Remembering how she’d felt about her mother, so angry and sad that she couldn’t give her another chance at life.

Could she come here and become an expert, as everyone seemed to think she should do? Become a Seamus-focused archivist? She wasn’t getting any younger, and maybe she should hand the farm over to younger people. Focus on her tech.

But try as she might, she couldn’t separate the farm and the tech. The tech was made from old machines that she found on the spoil heap, or dug up when she was farming, or that neighbors brought to her to fix or repurpose. Even if she moved to the brewery, the farming landscape was still around her. She couldn’t just sit in a white room with a melamine table and build things.

And she couldn’t research things. She wasn’t interested in where the tech had come from. In fact, her general feeling was that the world the tech came from was something they were all well rid of, and, if they were still using its tech, it was just until something better suited to the new world came along. The future probably lay with the nomads. She wondered if Portmeirion was like Pen-y-Groes, with more people joining the local nomads every year.

And as for whether she had the right, even, to give up Seamus . . . whether immediately or in the longer term . . .

“Are you real?” she asked it. “I mean, I know you exist physically. Just, are you more like a drone or a washing machine? Or are you more like a dog or a sheep?”

Seamus, obviously, didn’t answer or even acknowledge the question. Morag found herself wishing she did know more about how that sort of robot worked. Maybe if she did, she’d know the truth.

But she remembered that, back when Seamus had been built, that very question had been debated and debated and never answered.

Seamus activated. Stood. Trotted off the platform, down the curving staircase. Morag started to follow, then stopped, watched as the robot went down to the beach. It stood there, near the children and the dog, for about ten minutes.

Then, extending its claws, it dug a hole. A neat, square hole about thirty centimeters on either side.

Then it trotted back, settled back into power-saving mode.

Morag watched Seamus for a good few minutes, speculatively.

She didn’t know why it had done that. Was it in response to some perceived threat? Some long-buried routine?

But then again, why did humans do things?

Seamus had defensive modes, threat modes, patrol modes. Some situations put it on guard, others got it to play football. But Morag couldn’t say how that was different to human beings, when it came right down to it.

And digging holes for no good reason, using limbs built for climbing and defense to make something with no obvious use, was something very like human beings.

“I know what I have to do,” she said to the robot.

---

Morag went back to the chief archivists the next day. Or, more precisely, she went back to John. The other two were apparently off about their various jobs about the archive.

“I can’t do it,” she said to him.

John didn’t seem surprised. “You think Seamus is sentient?”

“No,” she said. “But the fact is, I don’t know if Seamus is sentient. And because I don’t know, I can’t dismiss the possibility.”

John nodded. “There’s always a place for you, and for Seamus, here at the archive if you change your mind.”

---

So, Morag took her walking stick and set out along the Portmeirion Road, or the Pen-y-Groes road if that was how you wanted to think of it. Her robot by her side, the sun overhead.

She wasn’t sure she’d made the right decision, or if Zeb and Dai and Maya would understand why she’d made it. She wasn’t even sure how to tell them about it. What they’d say when she did.

But, whatever happened, she’d stand by it.

She heard footsteps hurrying behind her and turned. Maybe she’d left something behind at the glassworks and Nancy had found it.

But it was Saoirse. Her jacket flapping behind her, her head bare and her short red hair flying untidily in the sunlight. Her cheeks red from exertion.

When she reached Morag, she simply handed her a folder of papers.

“I looked it up,” she said. “It took me a while, but I found it out. The thing they used to control asthma was called corticosteroids. That’s the top document.”

Morag took the folder. “And the rest of the documents?” She glanced at them. Careful handwriting on pieces of paper, small sketches.

“It turns out steroids are a thing you can stimulate the body to produce.” Saoirse moved them off the road, not that anyone was particularly using it at this time of day. “I did some research, and this is a list of plants and other things that can be used to stimulate steroid production.” She looked a little embarrassed. “I don’t actually know how many of them work. If any. Some of it might be just urban legends. I got some of it from books about bodybuilding. But some of it’s from medical texts.”

Morag didn’t quite know what to say. “Well, it’s as good as anything we can provide, and it’s certainly better than what we had before, which was nothing. You’re not going to get into trouble for this, are you?”

Saoirse looked surprised. “Oh, heavens, no,” she said. “I did the research, so it’s mine to give away if I want.”

“So . . . that’s how it works? Then why were they asking me to give them Seamus?” Morag was confused, and angry at the same time. If they thought they could take advantage of her like that . . .

“That’s how it works,” Saoirse confirmed. “Everyone owns the archive. If you do a piece of research with it, that research is yours, and you can do what you like with it. That’s what they were offering. Either you get them to do the research for you, by giving them Seamus, or you come here and do the research yourself. But you have to join the community to do that.”

“I think I understand,” Morag said. “Not entirely sure I like it, but I understand.”

Saoirse’s face softened. “Do please come back,” she said. “Not now, not if you don’t want to. But it would be good to have your knowledge, your mind, in the community. You don’t have to stay forever. But it might be a good thing to do for a little while.”

“And I wouldn’t have to give them Seamus?”

Saoirse looked ambiguous. “I’m sure something could be negotiated.”

Morag nodded.

“I don’t think it’s for me,” she said. “Not right now, anyway.” It would be many years before she left the farm, and she didn’t know what she’d be wanting then. Or what Seamus would need. It wasn’t a bad thing to have options.

“But my niece. I think she could get on very well in a place like this. Once she has these.” She gestured with the folder. She could see Maya, once she had the protection, going through the archive, researching these corticosteroids. Maybe joining those little groups on the beach or in the square.

Saoirse smiled. “Then tell her we’d be glad to have her.”

Morag nodded a goodbye, and carried on down the Portmeirion road. Her stick in her hand, her folder in her other hand, and her robot beside her.

She couldn’t say why, but she had a feeling like she’d won.