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 running a boxing school for Yellowstone orphans in one of the Low Earths. Yes, maybe it was time for her and Lobsang to find a project together. Something positive, something worthy, to assuage the guilt that nagged at her.
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 running of the twain’s engines miss a beat. Probably her imagination.
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.’
‘Really? What base? . . . If you’re mentioning asteroids I suppose you’re talking about outer space. Of course these days you’re in with the Oort cloud, as you put it.’
His grin could be surprisingly quirky. ‘My best jokes are like fine wine; they improve with age. But I wouldn’t have needed to work from the Oort cloud for this operation. A small near-Earth asteroid could have been deflected in for an impact in a matter of days, or less. Even hours if it was close enough. Of course, I’d have to make sure the area was clear, and put out warnings to any pioneers sniffing around for salvage, and set up some kind of system to help anybody who comes falling here, down through the soft places in that mysterious way, like Rich and George . . .’
She linked her arm with his. ‘Not today. Come on. Let’s get some breakfast, and take our lost boys home.’
But he didn’t move. He glanced over readings on the screens before him. ‘The boys are safely aboard, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. Still asleep in back. Why do you ask?’ Something beyond the window distracted her. ‘Lobsang?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s that light in the sky?’
‘Agnes, I wasn’t quite honest with you.
As soon as I picked up that message from the Next, I started making the preparations. I could easily have turned the rock away if it had seemed appropriate.’
‘That light that’s now falling from the sky – you’ve had a busy night, haven’t you? I’m supposed to be your conscience. What have you done, Lobsang? What have you done?’
To monitor the consequences, Lobsang had launched balloons, drone aircraft and even a couple of nanosats from the twain. And so Agnes saw it all.
In its last moments of existence the asteroid angled in across North America. It punched through Earth’s atmosphere in fractions of a second, blasting away the air, leaving a tunnel of vacuum where it passed.
And a boulder of ice and dust the size of a small house hit the ground.
The asteroid itself was utterly destroyed. The ground around the impact point was scoured by a blast of molten rock and superheated steam, by shock waves in the air, by flying debris, and then shattered by waves passing through the bedrock.
It was only a small asteroid strike, as such strikes go. The shallow crater would soon cool; there was no lingering radiation. Nobody was hurt. Nobody ever would be hurt because of this.
But Happy Landings was no more.
46
ACCORDING TO THE BARDO Thodol, in the sidpa bardo the spirit body could span continents in a moment. It could arrive at any place it desired in the time it took to reach out a hand.
And yet, Lobsang wondered, could even the spirit body reach into the human heart?
Acknowledgements
Some of the ideas behind the ‘Great Leap Sideways’ episode (chapter 15) featured in The Science of Discworld, by T.P. with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (1999).
All errors and inaccuracies are of course our sole responsibility.
T.P.
S.B.
December 2013, Datum Earth
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TERRY PRATCHETT is one of the world’s most popular authors. He is the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, and he was awarded a knighthood in recognition of his services to literature. Pratchett lives in England.
STEPHEN BAXTER is an acclaimed, multiple-award-winning author whose many books include the Xeelee sequence, the Time Odyssey trilogy (written with Arthur C. Clarke), and The Time Ships, a sequel to H. G. Wells’s classic The Time Machine. He lives in England.
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EPub Edition JUNE 2014 ISBN 9780062297310
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