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and through the paddock and didn’t look back until I was halfway up the hill.
    The Cat had vanished. The Utopia looked peaceful, almost idyllic; doll-like figures in a green and fruitful calm. I thought I saw Neil among the shadows of the distant orchard trees. It was hard to mistake his bulk.He was talking to someone—the girl Samantha perhaps. But he didn’t look my way and when I reached the top of the hill and looked down again the pair had gone.
    It occurred to me as my feet crunched wattle seeds and small dead twigs that I hadn’t asked if there was an easier way from my place to the community.
    But then I wouldn’t be visiting often.

Chapter 10
    T he nights consumed themselves, filled with a million memories I could never reach, a universe of data and other minds and worlds I would never now be able to create, and which always faded with the morning.
    The days fell into a pattern—meals and gardening and books. I forced myself to read to occupy my mind, to try to stop the images that pelted it. I made sure I worked physically at least three hours a day and walked for another hour. I was afraid that if I were less exhausted I wouldn’t sleep at all.
    The garden produced radishes, which I discovered I disliked, and small leaves of spinach as big as my thumb, and carrots all ferny top and no root. I had to sit and concentrate to remember that they grew their tops before their bottoms.
    I’d once done a Garden of Eden—a Reality I’d been particularly proud of. A flowering abundance of fruit and vegetables, bees, birds, butterflies, with a particularly subtle range of subliminals—you didn’t need to touch the fruit to taste it—each sense merging with another. I’d picked up quite a bit of information on the growing habits of various foods, which still stuck oyster-like in my mind.
    The Wombat visited irregularly, each third or fourth night perhaps, ate his bread or carrots and invaded the vegetable garden if I forgot to latch the gate. Either he didn’t know about latches or couldn’t manipulate them.A lyrebird visited the vegetable garden too; scratched up any recently dug dirt, but fled with a squawk of skinny legs and feathers when I approached.
    And I was lonely, with a bone-deep ache. Lonely for the companions of my mind. Lonely even for the chatter of a human voice, so that I almost did walk over the hill, almost hoped that one day the basket of milk and fruit and bread might not be there, so I would have an excuse to return.
    But it was there when I opened my door on the morning of every second or third day, and the previous basket taken in its place; never quite regular enough to wait and pretend to accidentally meet whoever brought it.
    If it was still Theo’s wife, Elaine, who delivered it, I thought, she must enjoy walking late at night or early in the morning, because it was never there when I looked before going to bed. But the only sounds I heard in the night were the gongs of far-off owls, the snuffling of the Wombat and the mutter of the community’s rooster when the wind blew from that direction.
    Then I finally met Elaine.
    I’d been reading, had unexpectedly been caught up in the book. Like all City children I’d learnt to read and write, then promptly forgot the skill until I was seventeen and my explorations in the databanks led me back into the days of printed words, and the half forgotten skills began to grow again.
    Now I found myself reading actual pages for pleasure, at first just a vague replacement for vids and Virtuals. (There wasn’t even a vid screen in the house, possibly because the City no longer produced screens that could be operated manually. If I ever wanted to see a vid again I’d have to go across the hill.)
    Reading had become an occupation for days when the sun burnt down too fiercely to go outside till dusk or when the wind gusted hot leaves and hotter air in quarrelsome buffets at the house and, finally, I found myself reading for enjoyment, not to ward