The Long Mars

But Agnes, over a drink, had told her how she had seen more sin, more darkness of the soul, in little anonymous tenements in Madison, Wisconsin than anything that might have been imagined in that London basement. More sin – more hell indeed. She had tried never to let it get through to her deep self, but even now that was difficult. Sometimes Agnes found herself agreeing with Lobsang in the worst of his tirades about humanity’s inadequacies. It was hard to remember that she had ever been i

Well, in her heart she hadn’t changed; she was driven by the same impulses that had always shaped her life. She yearned to comfort frightened children: as simple as that. To soothe the worried and apprehensive. To feed the hungry. This had been her life, after all, most of it, the other part being farting in the halls of the mighty . . . Now, oh, how she missed the wards and kindergartens, the kitchens and the hospices! No doubt about it, she would have to ask Lobsang for time away, to find some forlorn and forsaken corner of the Long Earth, or even somewhere in the long-suffering Datum, where she could make a difference.

Or, better yet, the two of them could find something to work on together. She sensed Lobsang was coming into a time of change himself. He’d become more inward-looking, more reflective. He’d even quietly asked Agnes to run down his training routines. She’d politely dismissed his volunteer trainers; Cho-je, she believed, was now ru

And at the same time her cynical side chided herself for that insidious guilt. This of course was the dark secret of Catholicism, what kept it working on you no matter how sophisticated you thought you were, how well you thought you knew the tricks. You carried your own Inquisitor with you at all times.

Even, in Agnes’s case, beyond the grave.

That evening, with the boys settled on improvised beds in the small store at the back of the gondola, Agnes was taken aback to find Lobsang – who in other iterations was no doubt at this moment walking in the deepest trenches of the oceans, or across the far side of the moon – seated at a table on the twain’s small observation gallery, carefully pruning a large bonsai tree inside a glass sphere, tending to the disposition of every root and branch and twig with all the attention a mother would give her firstborn. And he was hanging tiny handmade favours from the miniature branches, in the fashion of the garden of a Buddhist monastery.

Agnes said, ‘That’s wonderful. I’ve never seen the like before.’

Lobsang stood up as she entered the cabin. He always stood up whenever she came into a room, and reflecting on that softened something in her. ‘I thought it was time I gave it some attention. This was a gift from Sally Linsay, would you believe? This tree was originally grown in space. She collected it on her way back from the Long Mars. Sally’s not one to bring home souvenirs, still less a gift for me. But she said it reminded her of me – of the Earth and yet not of it, at the same time. It seems to be adapting to gravity very well . . .’

As she sat with him in companionable silence, letting him return to his work, not for the first time she explored her feelings for this creature – his Doctor Frankenstein to her revived monster – this man. Lobsang endlessly manipulated people and circumstances, intervening covertly and seamlessly, which won him a lot of enemies. But as far as she could see it was always done from a standpoint of a thoughtful fondness for human beings, for all he might rail at their flaws. As far as she knew no human life had come to an end as a result of Lobsang’s intervention, whereas many lives had been saved by his hidden hand – most recently the Next children, thanks to his behind-the-scenes fixing through Joshua and Sally and Nelson. Not to mention all he’d done for the trolls in the past . . .

What was it she felt for Lobsang exactly? Not love, surely not that. She was his wife only in a metaphorical sense. And besides, Lobsang wasn’t an entity you could love in the human way. It was as if, as she sometimes thought, she was in the presence of an angel. ‘Like nothing I ever saw before,’ she murmured. ‘Or ever will again.’

‘What’s that, Agnes?’

‘Lobsang, stand up for a moment, will you?’

Looking momentarily puzzled, Lobsang stood and walked over to Agnes – who stood herself, grabbed him, planted a kiss on his cheek, and hugged him close, her head against the chest of his ambulant unit. And as he held her, she could have sworn she heard the smooth ru

That night, instead of undressing and retiring to her bed as usual, Agnes put on her warmest clothes, walked through the lounge, and knocked on the door of the wheelhouse. The door was opened by a rather puzzled Lobsang. The lights were dimmed, the tiny control room flooded with moonlight.

Agnes stood with him. ‘You know, once upon a time you told me that at night, travelling on a twain, you like to stay up and watch the moon. Or the moons, if you’re stepping. Tonight let’s watch the moon together.’

He smiled a genuine smile. ‘It would be my privilege and pleasure.’

She grunted. ‘Don’t get soppy on me. Now, where do you keep the Baileys?’

In due course, however, with Lobsang at her side, a blanket on her lap, in the warmth of the wheelhouse, immersed in its calm mechanical humming, she fell asleep after all.

When she woke, it was morning.

Lobsang was still at the window, scowling down at Happy Landings.

‘Lobsang?’

‘We need to clean up here,’ he said without turning.

‘Clean up? How?’

‘All this will have to be removed. The buildings, the field boundaries, even the roads. Erased. That’s something I can do for the benefit of Next and mankind, whether they asked me to or not.’

She suppressed a sigh. She badly needed her first coffee of the morning, before dealing with Lobsang being Lobsang. ‘What are you talking about? Why would you do this?’

‘Agnes, please stop looking at me as if I’m mad. Consider the logic. The coming race has made it clear it’s gone, as far away from our kind as it can get.’

‘Where do you think they’ve gone?’

‘The message I heard said they have set aside a kind of reservation, a stretch of the Long Earth previously uninhabited, that they now claim as their own. They call it the Grange. How extensive it is – one world, a million – and where it is, East or West, how far out, I don’t know. It may not even be contiguous, for all I know – I mean, not all in one piece. All the rest of the Long Earth is ours, they say. Gracious of them, isn’t it?

‘But, frankly, if a self-imposed segregation is their choice – well, it could be a lot worse. For us, I mean. After all we already threatened to wipe them out once. Right now it appears that survival is their priority, at least while they’re still few in number. I don’t believe they mean any harm to us, so long as we leave them alone. But I suspect that if we make a nuisance of ourselves . . .’

‘So you don’t want to leave any chance that we could follow them.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And therefore you’d destroy this place. And any possible clues to their destination.’

‘It’s all I can do, Agnes.’

Yet Agnes knew in her heart of hearts that Lobsang longed to do more. He longed to know. To be with the Next. But all he could do here was play the role of a caretaker, to tidy up after them, just as when he swept up the leaves in his troll park at stepwise Madison.

He mused now, ‘How to do it? I suppose I could persuade as many trolls as I can find to come here and demolish the lot. Remove all trace of everything that was Happy Landings. The alternative would be to drop a small asteroid, right on top of City Hall. Cheap and easy for me to do, given the base I’ve got to work from.’