6530 words, short story
The Walled Garden
Not long after the local billionaire was shot by his own robots in the Georgian manor house he’d refitted as his survival bunker, Morag packed up her rucksack, left her parents’ farm, and went out into the mountains to live as a nomad.
The villagers whispered that Morag, who had been working as a security guard at the manor at the time, had been the one to set the robots free from their programming restraints. She certainly was one of the few who had the skills, and it would explain why she’d been so haunted and silent when she came down from the Big House, the Big Man’s two children hanging off her hands and crying.
And people whispered it a lot.
Meaning, it didn’t surprise anybody when she walked out the farm gates with her rucksack, a sleeping bag, a slingshot, a utilitool, a tinderbox, and her father’s copy of the SAS Survival Guide. Leaving behind her parents and the Big Man’s children, now increasingly regarded as village children, and being known by their proper names of Zeb and Casey. Also leaving behind her phone, and her watch, and her tablet, and her headphones, and her little bundle of tiny picks and tweezers for fixing things.
Morag didn’t think she’d want to touch anything technical ever again.
Twenty-five or thirty years later, Morag sat back on her heels in the mud of what had once been her parents’ farm and said to her robot, “Well, that’s the polytunnel done for, then, Seamus.”
Seamus was occupied with digging a rectangular hole about the size and shape of its own body, using the aluminum claws on its front set of limbs and bracing itself on the other four.
Morag contemplated the rip in the polythene sheet, flapping in the cool early spring wind. Maybe it had been torn by a foraging animal, or maybe it had just given out on its own.
“I don’t know where I’m going to get another,” she said, “and I expect even if I could find one, it’d be expensive as hell. But the plastic-fixer in Pen-y-Groes has patched and patched and patched this one, and there’s no real point in patching it anymore. It’s got too many holes in it to keep the heat in now. So what do I do? Give up growing fruit?”
That was a very worrying idea. She was dependent on the fruits and vegetables she grew for vitamins; they made the regular diet less boring; and she sold any surplus to town-dwellers fresh or as preserves, meaning an income for her and better health for them.
“Ask Owen next door if I can use his?” Owen’s polytunnels were in as bad a shape as hers, and the same was true of everyone else in the village who still used them. A lot of people were facing exactly the same problem as her.
Seamus finished digging its hole. Morag went over to look. Seamus had been doing that a lot lately, and, unlike most of Seamus’ activities, there seemed to be no obvious practical reason. Most of the things it did—patrolling, carrying small objects on its back, warning her of danger, intervening in threatening situations—were exactly what you’d expect from something like Seamus. A repurposed security walkbot that had wandered away from the Big House after the massacre, and eventually found its way, decades later, to the spoil heap behind the village, and from there to Morag’s farm.
Morag revised that mentally. It was a self-repurposed walkbot. She’d taught it some new routines and tricks since it had come to live with her, but it had joined her of its own accord, for its own reasons. And who knew what it had done for the many years it had presumably spent wandering the hills in between.
She supposed she could excuse it a few quirks and eccentricities.
A vague memory surfaced, involving other robots digging holes for no obvious reason. Another data point, but nothing that was helping her fix the polytunnels.
“So,” she asked again, looking at the polytunnel, “what should I do?”
Morag’s parents had been worried about her when she left, of course, but only in the way parents always worry about children. There was nothing terribly unusual about people going off to be nomads. The young got fed up with living on farms or in craft households. The old wanted a little excitement while they still had the energy for it. The traumatized wanted a new start. Sometimes the nontraumatized did too.
Mostly, they would join one of the more organized preexisting local nomadic tribes, like the Children of Flame or the Hawk Winds. But that wasn’t Morag’s way, and, after three years working in a squad of security guards with all the toxic hierarchies that sort of job acquires, she was distinctly wary of anything involving groups.
That was one of the things she really liked about being a nomad. She could go for days without seeing a single other human being, and, when she did see one, they generally left her alone.
Living off the land was easier than she thought. Even without her tech. Especially without her tech. Having been raised on an organic farm, and having spent a lot of time reading books on things like edible mushrooms and how to fish, keeping fed wasn’t much of a problem. Keeping dry was harder, but she’d learned a few tricks, mostly involving pine boughs, that turned out to work well in practice. The tinderbox had an arrangement of mirrors, concentrating heat onto the tinder, so she didn’t have to worry about keeping matches or sticks dry. The only large predators in those parts were the wolves, which had probably escaped from the environmental research facility out near Bangor that no one had heard from in a while. And the wolves usually left people alone, preferring easier meals.
And if she sometimes woke up from nightmares about the security robots silently and methodically gunning down the people who had once called themselves their masters . . . well, she could look out at the green hills and the sheep and the birds and it all seemed like something out of a novel.
She didn’t think she’d ever want to go back to the village.
“What did people do before there was plastic?” she asked Naomi, who ran the post office and had a lot of time to read books, and so was a useful person to go to with questions like that.
Naomi frowned over her tea mug. Outside her small cottage next to the post office, Morag could see the lake, the dark green woods, and beyond that, the mountains, the sheep grazing on them like white flecks of snow. “Glasshouses, I think,” she said, taking another scone. “Panels of clear glass, in wooden or lead frames.”
“I suppose Nancy, the glazier in Portmeirion, might be able to make those? Wouldn’t be cheap, though. And it’d take a long time.”
“Back in the day, it was only rich people could afford them,” Naomi agreed. “There was a while when they were cheaper, but that was down to industrialization.”
“Which we don’t have, and couldn’t bring back even if we wanted to,” Morag said, splitting a scone and covering it with butter. “What did people do before that? Die of malnutrition?”
Naomi shook her head. “Walled gardens.”
“I’m assuming you don’t mean in the Internet sense,” Morag smiled slightly. Naomi was a little younger than her and still remembered the Internet and its language.
“Yes, and no,” Naomi said. “People built gardens, within walls like the name implies, and yes, it was partly to keep people out. But the design helped maximize heat. Kept the garden warmer than it would have been. Before glass and polytunnels. There must have been one at the Big House. Did you see it, when you were up there?”
“I might have done.” Morag vaguely remembered a set of crumbling, thick brick walls out behind the main manor building. Remembered the aluminum dome over them, like a planetarium, the interior painted with a blue sky with impossible fluffy clouds. “I think the Big Man turned it into a swimming pool and sauna. He wasn’t interested in learning from history, really, except the bits about feudal lords with armies and control over lots of serfs.”
She put up her own mental brick walls about that bit. The idea of being part of that army, of being someone who had to go and frighten and hurt and maybe kill the people she’d grown up with, to make sure they regarded him as their lord, was what had made her finally decide things couldn’t go on as they were.
“I could go up there and look at it. See if it could be fixed.”
“And if it can’t, maybe we could still learn something from looking at how it’s built,” Naomi said. Abruptly, she looked tired.
“You okay?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. Just . . . the incomers.” She didn’t need to say much more. After the Big House fell, a few people had tried to do what the Big Man had wanted, and tried setting up feudal communities. With more success than the Big Man, but even then, eventually, they always went too far.
There’d been one group of feudalists nearby, a couple of years earlier, which had made some fairly significant territorial gains before it collapsed. Their final mistake had been trying to establish a presence in the area around Pen-y-Groes. The local nomads had banded together with Morag, Naomi, and the other villagers to let him know what they thought of hierarchies.
The problem was that when the feudalist group collapsed, it had left a not-insignificant number of soldiers and laborers without work and homes. And there were more and more people coming west out of the big cities, looking for someplace healthier to be. The tribes had absorbed a lot of people, but not everyone was cut out for nomadic life.
Some of the farmers had been happy to take on boarders in exchange for work, and Zeb and his husband Dai the Brewer had added a few more children to their huge extended family of strays and orphans, but within the village, it was becoming hard to find the room. And people were starting to make the sort of generalizing remarks about newcomers that usually led to trouble later on.
“All the more reason to build the garden,” Morag said. “We need to house them, but we need to feed them as well.”
“Then let’s do this,” Naomi said.
Three weeks into her life as a nomad, Morag woke up to see the robots.
Four or five of them. Security robots, probably from the Big House or from some other failed project, like the environmental research facility. White, six-legged oblongs, about the size of a collie dog, with an extendible arm on the anterior face.
Morag kept still and breathed quietly, like she would if they were wolves or deer. She realized she was being silly. It wasn’t like she was going to frighten them off. Then she remembered that some of the robots had guns, and, if the guns didn’t work, they were capable of killing with the retractable climbing claws on their legs alone.
She’d seen it happen. Was still seeing it happen, in front of her eyes, sometimes, when she hadn’t put up her mental brick walls.
But these robots didn’t seem interested in her. They were doing something a little way uphill, something that was interesting them.
Morag told herself not to anthropomorphize. But she remained still nonetheless, until they’d finished what they were doing and ambled on, back into the pine woods.
When she was sure they were gone, Morag clambered as quietly as she could out of her sleeping bag, off the bed of pine boughs she’d made to keep herself dry and comfortable, and went to look at what they’d been doing.
They’d been digging holes. Not randomly. In patterns. Geometrical shapes, stars and triangles and scraped traceries of dirt that looked oddly like mandalas.
Morag wondered why. It didn’t seem to have any purpose. A random error? A routine that had once been useful, gone wrong? Something else—she remembered Zeb and Casey teaching a security robot how to do a haka, and had a giddy vision of robots dancing under the moon.
But she didn’t really want to think about robots just then. She gathered her things and set out across the mountain.
“Well, here goes nothing,” Morag said to Seamus. They were standing in front of the walled garden that used to be a swimming pool. The white aluminum dome of the roof was caved in, like a giant had stepped on it. The doors were solid, but the lock had been electronic, and it didn’t take Morag more than a few minutes to break it.
She walked, silent, around the edges of the building. Looking at the pool, now a stained and cracked dip with a thick mat of algae growing over the water in the middle. Masses of rotten timbers that, when pushed aside, exposed a heating mechanism. “The sauna,” Morag said aloud. Shafts of sunlight through the broken dome, illuminating heaps of rubbish, colonizing plants. Young pine trees and spreads of buddleia.
But the walls were still standing, and the geometry worked.
She could see the walled garden underlying the tiles and plastic. Like they were just a bad episode in its past, already fading away as the building itself endured.
Walking back out into the sunlight, she stopped and glanced over at the Big House. Parts of it were in ruins, thanks to decades of neglect. The leader of the collapsed feudal community had holed up in the East Wing cellars for a while after being beaten by the locals, until Morag had persuaded him to move on.
But she wasn’t ready to go in there again herself.
She turned her back.
Morag had taken the digging, mandala-making robots as an omen, and it turned out to be a bad one. The day turned from overcast to drizzly to rainy, and Morag’s foraging didn’t turn out much, bar a few edible mushrooms and a couple of old motherboards.
Suddenly, a river of asphalt spread out before her, and she realized she was only a short walk from Porthmadog.
Morag got out the motherboards, looked at them critically. Suppressing the wave of memory of fixing the tech at the Big House. Of surreptitiously reprogramming the robots to allow them the choice, whether to keep working for the Big Man or not. Of what followed.
She concentrated on the motherboards, on the here-and-now. They were clean and in good condition, and could be repurposed or, if not, the metal could be harvested. The tech workshop in Porthmadog would probably trade her some credit with the grocery store. She strode into town and emerged an hour later much more cheerful, her bargaining skills with both the tech fixer and the grocer having gained her a loaf of bread, a wheel of cheese, and a jar of set honey.
By the time she reached the forest, the sun was on the horizon. She made herself a sleeping platform and a rain shelter out of pine branches, had a supper of bread, cheese, mushrooms, and honey, wrapped the leftovers carefully in the cloth bag the grocer had given her, and settled down to sleep.
She was wakened in the night by growls and scuffles.
Although she got out of her sleeping bag quickly enough, the wolf was faster, and the last she saw of her hard-won food was a flash of a gray tail as the scavenger raced into the pines.
“I know I’m not the only one who’s running out of polythene sheets,” Morag said to the assembled villagers in the Stag’s Head. “And those of you who are doing okay for them, great, but when they run out, there won’t be any more. And I’ve got an idea.”
She passed round the book Naomi had found, with the marks in where the bits were about walled gardens.
“I’ve checked. The one up at the Big House can be fixed up. It’ll take time and effort, but planting’s done, and we can spare the time. Work shifts. We could pool our resources, and then all take shares in the garden.”
“Would we appoint a full-time gardener?” Owen asked.
“We could do,” Morag said; she’d thought of that as well. “But it might be more practical just for everyone to do their own gardening in it, and watch out for each other, like we do with the sheep grazing and other common land activities.” Appointing a gardener also had its own dangers, leading to ideas about gatekeeping and control, and some people being worth more than others. The walled garden’s walls had to be physical, not metaphorical.
There were a few general affirmative noises from the villagers.
“Unless someone else wants to, I’m happy to do the research and draw up plans.” The response to this was definitely affirmative.
“When we know what we need, we can draw up a work rota. Allocate tasks based on skills and time.” Naomi looked ’round the room.
“I’ll go up to the archive at Portmeirion tomorrow,” Morag said. “I’ll catch a lift on Zeb’s wagon when he delivers the beer to the inn and stay with Nancy the glazier. If any place will have materials on how to do this, it’s there.”
“It’s about time someone did something about the Big House,” Ellie, who ran the Stag’s Head with her family, said. “It’s not right, letting it go into ruin. We need to do something with it. Make it useful.”
Morag suppressed a surge of complicated emotion. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s get that walled garden going first, though, eh?”
Morag walked to the coast the next day to fish, which gave her plenty of contemplation time for figuring out the food storage problem. Clearly, she needed to find a way to keep surplus food, particularly attractive surplus food like bread and cheese, out of the jaws of wolves and other scavengers. She still had the honey, but that was only because they hadn’t managed to break the jar.
Some kind of bag, she thought, giving up on the fish and packing up her line. A bag and a rope. Something she could haul into the trees. Wolves can’t jump or climb. Foxes can, but they’re not likely to go to that much trouble.
But what could she make the bag out of?
She managed to bring down a hare with a slingshot later that afternoon and skinned it with more care than usual. Perhaps she could collect enough animal skins to stitch together into a storage bag.
But she had no idea how to preserve skins, and by the next day, the hare skin was beginning to make a nauseating smell and attract flies. She left it for the scavengers and went back to thinking her way around the problem.
“I’m afraid this is all we’ve got,” Saiorse said apologetically.
Morag frowned at the collection assembled on the melamine desk in one of Portmeirion’s study rooms. “A couple of books, one of them a fantasy novel, and four back issues of Town and Country magazine.”
“We did have more, but they were too badly damaged in the floods ten years ago to save.” Saoirse winced. “And I suppose people didn’t think writing that sort of thing down was important enough. I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey. It’s a good fantasy novel, though? Written by a local author.”
“Preservation’s so random,” Morag smiled to show she wasn’t upset. “We’ll just have to start from first principles. Shame none of the professors who started this place was an architect, eh?”
“Actually, we did have one.” Saoirse frowned speculatively. “Robert Novack. But he hasn’t been around for a good fifteen years. He turned nomad.”
“So . . . ” Morag said, “he would have joined The Unmutuals?”
“Yes.” The Unmutuals’ territory was mostly in the hills around Portmeirion. That was the way things were becoming, Morag reflected. Most little towns had a band of nomads walking a circuit around the area. Villagers who got itchy feet joined the nomads. Nomads who got tired or sick came back to the towns. Both of them loved and hated the land, and each other, in different ways and from different perspectives.
“But he wouldn’t have cracked a book in all that time, even assuming he’s still alive.”
“Doesn’t matter. People have great memories.”
“Without writing?”
“Especially without writing. Do you know where The Unmutuals are camped?” Morag pulled on her jacket. “Come on, let’s go find them. Seamus?”
The little robot usually settled down in power-saving mode in a corner of the room when it didn’t have anything else to do, like a dog taking a nap. But it wasn’t there.
After a bit of searching, they found it in a room with a lot of optical equipment. It had arranged pieces of colored glass and domed lenses on the floor in a careful pattern, pushing them with its forelimbs.
“Seamus! I’ll have to clear that up, and I’ve no idea where it all goes!” Saoirse exclaimed, her plump cheeks going pink with emotion.
“Don’t worry, it’s all cataloged.” Morag frowned at the pattern, trying to make sense of it. “Sorry, Seamus. I don’t want to stop you making art, but you do have to find a way of not doing it with other people’s things.”
Rope, Morag thought as she wandered by the side of a small river the next day, keeping an eye out for lazy fish or crustaceans. Rope and a net, or maybe thinner rope to make a net out of. Or, better, a cloth, one waterproof enough to hold the food and keep it dry, or to keep any drippy bits from leaking out onto the ground.
The trees thinned, and the river expanded out into a marshy area.
“Rushes,” Morag said aloud. “Rushes. They make fiber out of rushes, don’t they?”
A memory came to her, that this generally involved drying and pounding and other things she couldn’t really do without settling somewhere for a while.
But, she thought as she bent some of the plants experimentally, the green ones might do, at least for now. They were long enough to braid and twist together, and flexible enough not to break when she tried that experimentally. Maybe she could make some baskets? And a rope to hang them up with?
Morag cut a large stock of rushes, as many as she could manage, and set up camp on a dry bit of land near the marsh. She spent the rest of the day twisting and folding and pushing and swearing, ’til by the evening she did have a couple of large-ish baskets, even if they were lumpy and lopsided.
She put her supplies in one, experimentally.
And watched as the whole thing fell apart.
There had to be a way of folding the ends to keep them together? Or maybe something she could use as an adhesive?
But whatever those were, she didn’t have any, so she spent another night with her storage problem still unsolved.
The Unmutuals, or some of them anyway, were camped in the woods above Portmeirion. They looked up as Morag, Seamus, and Saoirse approached. Wary, but not hostile. They knew Morag and Seamus, at least by sight, and Saoirse was wearing one of the brown overall coats that most scholars at Portmeirion treated as a kind of uniform. Nomads generally adopted distinctive, but collective, styles, and The Unmutuals tended to wear loose, gray or brown, poncho-style hooded garments and black-and-white face paint.
Morag felt self-conscious. “I’m looking for one who used to be called Robert Novack,” she said. Then, “I want to build a walled garden, and I’m told he might know how.”
A few of the older members went into a huddle, then parted. “The one who used to be called Robert Novack is dead,” one of them said, in a hoarse, deep voice.
Morag’s heart sank. That was the last possible source of information gone, then. She reminded herself that it would be okay, that they would collectively work out how to build a garden, working things out as they came up. But finding someone who had the knowledge and skills would have saved them a lot of work.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
The old nomad raised their hand. “The one who used to be called Robert Novack is dead,” they repeated. “But not before he passed the knowledge on.” They looked back at the rest of the nomads. “Who can help Morag and the Villager?”
Three or four young nomads raised their hands, with a chorus of “I! I! I!”
The old nomad smiled at them. “Since I know you don’t have our memory skills,” they said, “I hope you brought pencils and paper.”
Toward evening, Morag stamped along the hillside in the growing drizzle. Thinking about the storage problem. Not finding anything coming to mind after the disasters with the skins and the baskets.
Might as well go home, she thought. Can’t make it as a nomad.
But she also couldn’t stand the village and the farm. Just thinking about it made her itchy. All those people. The ones who survived the Big House massacre, reminding her that it happened. The ones who didn’t, asking her how the Big Man died and why no one was in the house anymore. Zeb and Casey wanting to know when they could go home to California and not understanding that they couldn’t. The spoil heap and the Big House and—
Morag missed her footing, slipped, and slid a couple of dozen meters down a grassy slope. Into a pit of loose slate and colonizing plants.
Her hand went down, came up with a frayed length of nylon guy-rope.
Morag laughed. For decades, the area had been full of people coming out from the cities to climb mountains and camp out. Bringing their tents, and their tentpoles, and their ropes, and stoves, and all the comforts of civilization. And leaving them behind if they got a little bit broken, because they could always buy a new one.
“Not anymore,” she said.
A half-hour’s digging got her a decent amount of rope, a rectangular panel from a torn pup-tent, and some wheels off a suitcase that she could turn into a decent pulley system. Also, a compass with a cracked glass, a broken GPS watch, and a phone, all of which she was pretty sure she could fix.
“I might not be able to weave baskets or tan skins,” she said to her haul, “but I can find old stuff and fix it. That’s just who I am.”
“I told you, they’re here to help,” Morag told Naomi, who was looking askance at the poncho-clad nomads helping Tom the Pole to pry out the pipe mechanism under the swimming pool.
“They’ll want a cut of the harvest, I assume,” Naomi said, her lips going thin.
Morag shrugged. “Small enough price to pay. They all memorized the information from the architect. That’s also why Saoirse is here.” She glanced at the archivist, who was writing furiously on a slate. “She wants to document the process of building the garden. So other villages can make their own.”
“I’m more worried about whether or not the Children of Flame will object to a rival group in their village,” Naomi said. “You know how they can kick off.”
“They won’t. I had a word with my sibling.”
“Zeb?” Naomi looked doubtful.
“No, Casey.”
“Oh, right.” Casey had joined the Children of Flame some twenty-five years ago, and most of the year was off on the hillsides, wielding a staff, clad in a feather-mask and rag-shirt. “Even so, will they listen to Casey?”
“They don’t have leaders,” Morag said. “And their logic isn’t always recognizable from outside. But I think they’ll listen.”
“Still. How are we going to feed and house these Unmutuals?”
“They’ve worked that out,” Morag said. After a pause, she explained, “They’re all staying in the Big House.”
“Are they now?”
“They’ve cleared out the East Wing, fixed the roof. Opened up the fireplaces.”
“Hm.” Naomi said. “D’you think we might ask the young people and the incomers to join them? Free lodging for people who want to rebuild, to make it their own.”
“Good idea.” The Big House wouldn’t die, Morag thought. But it would have a new life, one that wasn’t for closing off from the world and hiding a Big Man. An open community of lots of little men and women and animals and everyone else . . .
“What’s your robot doing?” Naomi changed the subject.
Seamus had been digging again, this time a perfect cylinder of earth, like an inverted silo.
“Art,” Morag said.
Morag spent the next day fishing, with a sense of triumph, and traded the compass to a farmer in exchange for a loaf of bread. She went back to the tree line. Something had a neat row of square holes along the fringe of smaller trees. The robots, she assumed.
She wondered if they’d be back and if she’d get to see them, but she doubted it.
Still feeling pleased with herself, she made a fire, cooked the fish while she fixed up a shelter, and ate it.
Then she rigged up her storage bag.
It took her two tries to get the pulley system right, and more time to find a branch. But with some struggling and swearing, she pulled the food up into the tree.
“There,” she said to no one in particular.
And then she felt a sense of being watched. Or not being watched exactly, but that there was someone else among the trees with her.
She took out her utilitool, held it. It had a knife attachment, but she knew better than to try and use that for fighting. However, a small object held in the hand makes a punch go further. She crouched, moved stealthily toward the little sounds.
Outside the grove was a nomad.
“We’ve got a problem,” Saoirse said over breakfast. Morag had accepted her invitation because she was curious to see the Big House rebuilding project. And she’d been impressed. The new residents had brought a number of the rooms up to a reasonable level of comfort, had fixed up the henhouse in the back, and had the kitchen working well enough to use for individual and communal cooking. Hence, eggs, kippers, and oat bread, at least as good as the loaves Morag could make herself in her own kitchen.
“You surprise me,” Morag said, accepting another mug of tea. The tea was relatively local, from the plantation in Ffestiniog. The tea-growers were making a good enough go of it that they were exporting some of their tea to the cities in the south. “What sort of problem could you inventive people possibly have?”
“I don’t think the garden’s going to be warm enough.”
“But we’re following the directions exactly,” Morag said. “Are we missing information? Getting something wrong?”
Saoirse shook her head. “I’ve been talking with the nomads, and I sent a message back to the archive for our meteorologist. We think it’s climate change. Things have got colder up here in the winters, hotter in the summers, than when the garden was built.”
“We could rig up fans, blow the hot air back down into the system?” Morag thought. “Except solar panels are hard to fix and harder to make. It has to be something that doesn’t involve energy.”
“Back to the glasshouse idea, then?”
“Same problem as before. Too expensive, too much hard work, and too breakable.” Morag cleared away her mug and plate. “You carry on at the garden. I’ll go back to the tech shed and have a think.”
But she didn’t go straight back there. She turned away, walked through the corridors of the Big House. The electric lights and off-white paint were gone, replaced by bright murals and hanging lanterns and open doors. The furniture was the sort of random mash-up of styles that the Big Man would have loathed. She could hear a baby crying, someone tuning a fiddle. An Unmutual wandered past, yawning, their hood thrown back, their sparse hair uncombed, and their makeup smeared.
“You’re gone,” she said to whatever part of the Big Man might be remaining. “The house endures. But you’re gone, as if you never were.”
The nomad was in tribal regalia, a sort of loose coat, but nothing Morag recognized. Their staff was laid to one side and their hood was back; relaxed, unafraid. Long hair, so maybe they were a Hawk Wind.
The nomad was doing something with their hands.
They turned their head, made eye contact. Morag froze.
But they just nodded.
Morag felt as if she were under an obligation. She went back to her campsite, loosened the food storage bag. It came down with a crash, just missing her head. Clumsily, she opened it, took out some of the bread and fish. Put it to one side, rigged up the storage again, chased off an inquisitive crow, and brought it to the nomad.
“Here,” she said. “I scored. You can have some if you like.”
The nomad nodded in thanks. Put the food to one side.
Morag was curious. Why not eat it straight away? But the nomad carried on making whatever it was they were making, so Morag settled down to watch.
She realized, after a bit, that it was a kind of basket. A square one, made out of strips of reed—properly treated, of course, of course—cut and folded into a square. Sealing the edges with pine tar.
After it was done, the nomad put the food in the basket. Closed its lid, sealed it.
“That won’t keep the wolves out for long,” Morag said.
The nomad nodded. Took the basket, went over to the line of robot holes. And Morag realized that the basket was exactly the size of one of the holes, just a little bit smaller on top.
The nomad put the basket in, then deliberately dug the earth back over the basket.
Morag laughed. “That’s brilliant,” she said.
They sat together for a while, in the sunset. The nomad took out marijuana and a pipe, fixed it up, and offered Morag a pull. She accepted.
“Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “There’s always more than one solution to a problem. Like keeping the wolves from scavenging our food. There’s mine, and yours, and I guess someone else might have come up with something else.”
She handed the pipe back to the nomad.
“Thanks,” she said.
Morag came back to the farm to find Seamus standing by a shallow hole. At the bottom were some broken pieces of glass with worn silvering on the back. Maybe an old mirror; it was hard to tell.
“Been making art again?” she asked Seamus. “It’s very pretty. I am going to have to clear it away, though, before someone steps on it and cuts themselves. Not a problem you have, I do recognize that . . . ”
Then she stopped. Frowned. Looked at it.
A round-ish piece, with narrow-ish pieces radiating around it, like the petals of a flower.
Or like something else.
Morag suddenly remembered the curved, faceted mirrored glass behind the bulb in her handheld torch. Remembered similar curved, faceted holders around intact LED lamps; a lot of houses still had them, though once they were gone, they’d be gone for good. Remembered Victorian bedside candleholders, also with mirrored faceted backs to maximize and concentrate the light. The lanterns in the Big House, also with mirrored sides.
Remembered the tinderbox she’d used to make fires when she was a nomad. With its mirrors, concentrating heat onto the tinder.
“The best art,” she told Seamus, “inspires. I think your installation here is about to have a major local exhibition.”
The door to her parents’ farmhouse was open. A bit risky, Morag thought. And then she thought, not really. The house was set far back from the gates; the geese would have warned them if any of the less friendly nomads intruded, and the friendly ones weren’t a problem.
She threw her rucksack down. “I’m back,” she announced.
Implicit, I’m not joining the tribes, and I’m not going off on my own again. At least not for a long time.
Her father looked up from the book he was reading. “Good,” he said. Then, after a moment, “Zeb found a broken solar panel in the back meadow the other day when he was tending the goats. We left it in the shed for you.”
“I’ll see if I can fix it,” Morag said.
Implicit: that’s what I do.
“Dinner’s at six.” Her father turned back to his book. “Your mother’s teaching Casey to cook.”
Implicit: We love you, and we worried about you. And we’re glad you’re not going anywhere for a while. Also, dinner will probably be half-raw and half-burnt, so be polite.
Smiling to herself, Morag went out to the shed.
“It’s simple, really,” Morag explained, pointing to the arrays of mirrors she’d set up at the corners of the garden. “The mirrors concentrate the heat, help reflect it back into the garden.”
“And the mirrors are made of . . . ?” Naomi tried to recognize them.
Morag grinned. “Aluminum roofing. From the swimming pool roof that caved in. It’s already curved, mostly in the right way. I got Danny at the repair shop to beat it into facets, and we polished the paint off.” Danny was sort-of her nephew, being one of Zeb’s orphans. Funny how these things came around. “Then, it was just a matter of working with The Unmutuals and Saoirse to get the angles right. They don’t have to reflect well enough to be pretty—they just have to concentrate the heat. And they’re not going to break like glass, and they can be replaced by any bit of shiny enough metal if the aluminum runs out.”
“New tech, made from old tech, and added to even older tech.” Naomi laughed. “It’s great. Listen, I got word from Borth-y-Gest. They’ve heard about what we did here, and they’d like to do something like it themselves. Would you be able to go over there, do the same sort of thing?”
Morag shrugged. “I can do better. I’ll give them copies of what Saoirse’s written. All the things we did, all the problems we encountered. All the fixes we figured out. But, if and when they improve on them, they’re to tell us in exchange.”
“So the knowledge doesn’t get lost?”
“Oh, knowledge always gets lost,” Morag said. “But it’s always getting found again. And there’s more than one way of fixing any given problem.”
Nodding goodbye to Naomi, she took her stick and headed back to the house. Wanting to see what art her robot had come up with now.
Fiona Moore is a BSFA Award winning, WFA shortlisted writer, academic and critic, author of Management Lessons from Game of Thrones and the Morag and Seamus series of cozy post-apocalyptic stories. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, and Interzone, and she has published two novels. She makes miniatures and runs a blog about cooking food from franchise tie-in cookbooks. She lives in London with a snowshoe cat who’s not bothered about anything.
