The Long Mars

45

A month after the return of the Armstrong and Cernan from Happy Landings, Lobsang announced he wanted to visit the place himself, one more time.

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 grinned. Rather endearingly he held a rake, as if he’d been sweeping up the leaves.

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 Guinness must have had something to do with it,” he admitted ruefully. “That or the leprechauns I’d been reading about.”

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.

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 innocent herself.

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 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.