The Long Mars

She met Joshua’s gaze. There was understanding in his expression. Understanding, and sympathy – for her, and Mac.

Shi-mi emerged, out of nowhere. Maggie hadn’t known she was in the room. She leapt on to Joshua’s lap, and he welcomed her with a stroke. ‘Hello, little girl.’

Shi-mi hissed at Mac, and Mac hissed back.

Then Mac pushed back his chair, stood up, and made for the door. ‘I reckon I’ll go and torment Ed Cutler a little. Maybe I could borrow your prosthetic hand, Joshua. Hey, Ed! Mein Führer – I can walk!’

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Joshua said to Maggie, when he’d gone. ‘This won’t mean much to you, but my headache has gone away. Maybe it means we made the right choice, here today. What do you think, Shi-mi?’

The cat just purred, and pushed her head into his artificial hand for a more vigorous stroke.

45

A MONTH AFTER THE return of the Armstrong and Cernan from Happy Landings, Lobsang a

And Agnes came along.

Agnes had heard only the most peripheral hints, mostly from Joshua, about what had gone on at Happy Landings, some big drama involving the military twains, and all sorts of weapons, and the children they were now calling ‘the Next’. The main thing as far as she was concerned was that in the end nobody had dropped bombs on anybody else, and that Paul Spencer Wagoner, formerly of the Home, was safe – although nobody seemed to know where he was, exactly.

She was, however, curious to go see this mysterious place for herself. Why not?

So they travelled, Lobsang and Agnes, just the two of them, on a small, comfortable private twain.

On the day they arrived over Happy Landings, Agnes woke at dawn, as usual. In the tiny galley area she rustled up a breakfast of scrambled eggs and coffee, and took it on a tray to Lobsang in the lounge. He always claimed eggs were good for both of them, their artificial bodies needed proteins.

She found him standing by the big picture window, staring out at the town. Looking down from the air, Agnes recognized the layout from the maps she’d studied: the river, City Hall, the big public squares, the trails off into the forest. She saw no sign that the military ships had ever been here. The place looked normal, for a High Meggers community.

Save that there was no movement. No traffic on the dirt tracks. No smoke rising from the buildings. No troll bands singing by the river.

‘Empty,’ she said.

‘They have gone. The Next. Them and their families. Even the neighbouring communities have been emptied out. In fact we’re standing on an empty continent, Agnes. And— Oh.’ Lobsang started, stiffened. All the animation seemed to flee from him.

‘Lobsang? Are you all right?’ She put down her tray and shook his shoulder. ‘Lobsang!’

And he came to life, his features mobile again. He sat down, slumping over as if he’d been punched.

‘Lobsang, what is it? What happened?’

‘I just got a message.’

‘What kind of message? Who from?’

‘The Next,’ he said, somewhat irritably. ‘Who else? A message somehow triggered by our arrival. It’s copied in radio frequencies – it’s hardly subtle.’

‘Never mind how. A message for you?’

‘Not exactly. A message for all mankind.’ He laughed, hollowly. ‘If only it had been for me. You know, I dreamed of dealing with the Next as an equal. Surely we would have shared interests. And after all I saved them, through my careful observations, my machinations through Nelson and Joshua and Roberta Golding and Maggie Kauffman, machinations that extracted them from the Hawaii base and saved them from nuclear destruction . . . I suppose I imagined being accepted as one of them. Evidently that’s not how they see me.’

‘Then how do they see you?’

‘An intermediary, I suppose. An ambassador, at best. A mere messenger at worst.’

‘A messenger?’

‘But even the message wasn’t for me alone . . . They’ve gone, Agnes. That’s what they say. Gone somewhere we can’t follow. They’ve taken themselves out of our reach. Well, wouldn’t you, given what humanity has already done to them – and contemplated doing?’ He sighed. ‘I must think about how to handle this. But I’ll take the ship down.’

‘You’ll eat your breakfast first,’ Agnes said, and she went to get the tray.

The twain descended on a grassy expanse by the river.

The two of them walked down the access ramp, to a ground littered with autumn leaves. There was none of the bustle, of people and trolls, that Agnes had imagined. The only motion was the fall of maple leaves; when she picked one up it was slightly fragrant. Some of the leaves had spilled on to the river water, clumps of them floating away like a regatta – a sight which, somehow, to Agnes, in the absence of people, was more disturbing than it had any right to be.

And she heard a soft crackle. A footstep on the leaves? She turned to see.

Lobsang said, ‘This place serves no further purpose – and it’s become much too well known, for the Next to be comfortable here again. But a unique community has been lost, a little of the richness of human experience. And so we’re alone, Agnes—’

‘Not quite.’ She pointed.

Walking towards them from the direction of City Hall were two figures: a young man and a boy, both wearing what looked like hand-me-down pioneer clothing.

‘Hello, Lobsang,’ said the man, in a broad New York accent, and he gri

The boy, who looked Asian, maybe Japanese, said nothing at all.

They both stared at Sister Agnes in her habit, and at Lobsang, in his trademark orange-robe-and-shaved-head uniform.

They took the boys aboard the twain, let them shower, fed them up, gave them better-fitting clothes than the left-behind stuff they’d found in the empty cabins of Happy Landings – promised them a ride out of here to wherever they chose to go – and let them talk.

The young man turned out to be called Rich. He’d fallen here – and that seemed to be the right expression for how Happy Landings worked, you ‘fell’, helplessly and haplessly, through some kind of network of soft places until you ended up in this peculiar pit of a place – fallen all the way from Dublin, which wasn’t even his home; he was an American exchange student studying Irish mythology. ‘I did think at first the Gui

The Japanese boy was called, incongruously, George; his mother was English. He was a high-school kid, out hiking when he, too, fell here.

Both had arrived to find the place deserted already. Evidently the eerie Long-Earth-wide collection mechanism that kept this place populated had not ceased to function when the inhabitants had evacuated. Happily, Agnes thought, Rich had arrived first, and had been on hand to help twelve-year-old George when he showed up. Even so they’d been here alone for weeks.

Rich seemed unfazed by his experience, though happy enough to have been rediscovered; neither of them had been sure how they had got here, and still less which way to go to get home. And as they talked, young George came out of his shell. In Agnes’s eyes he seemed to grow in confidence and even authority. Younger he might be but he was evidently a good deal smarter than Rich. Perhaps he could have been another of Happy Landings’ super-smart kids, she thought; perhaps he had Spencer or Montecute genes in him. She wondered what would become of him now.

Dealing with the boys did Agnes herself a power of good.

She wasn’t really one for vacations like this, even if she did rationalize it by telling herself her work now was caring for Lobsang. Sometimes Agnes wondered if she’d become a rich man’s plaything. A dreadful fate! Which Sister Concepta used to warn the senior girls about, back in Agnes’s long-gone convent-school days, speaking about hellfire punishments that in a perverse way made the prospect somewhat beguiling, and Agnes and friends like Guinevere Perch had giggled behind their hands. Well, the message evidently hadn’t sunk in for Guinevere, who at the peak of her career had owned extensive properties in Marbella and the Seychelles, and a very expensive Georgian terrace house in central London, handy for the House of Commons . . . Once Agnes had visited the London property, and Guinevere had shown Agnes some of the secrets in the well-appointed basement. The tawdry fittings, the cartoonish objects of lust, control and cruelty, their use meticulously recorded by Guinevere in her little notebook – it had made Agnes laugh out loud, rather to the amazement of her friend who might have been expecting a lecture.