Despite all that, Lobsang appeared to be sane, ferociously so in fact – a sanity that burned! As for his character, Lobsang had done some very good work – especially given, of course, that he had the capacity to do a large amount of harm, should he choose. And as far as she could see, whatever a theologian might say, he had a soul, or at least a near perfect facsimile. If he was like a god, then he was a benign god.
But Agnes had to admit that Lobsang shared something at least with Jehovah: they were both male and proud. Lobsang loved an audience. He was clever, no doubt about it, extremely clever, but he wanted the cleverness to be seen. So he sought sidekicks, people like Joshua Valienté, like Agnes; he needed to let his light shine on their wondering faces.
And yet this new age, after the volcano, was difficult for Lobsang too. Not physically, as it was for the rest of a hungry and displaced mankind, but in some other, more subtle way. Spiritually, perhaps.
Agnes wasn’t sure of the cause. Perhaps it was because he had been unable to do anything to avert the Yellowstone disaster. Even Lobsang could only see Yellowstone through the eyes of the geologists, and they had been distracted by the odd phenomenon of disturbances at the stepwise copies of Yellowstone across a swathe of Low Earths – none of which had amounted to much, compared with the eventual Datum eruption. That probably didn’t assuage the guilt of one who thought of himself as a kind of shepherd of mankind, however, an agent ‘who does the bits God left out’, as he once said to her.
Or perhaps it was that the catastrophe that had afflicted Datum Earth, and particularly Datum America, had inevitably knocked a hole in the infrastructure of gel-based stores and optical fibre networks and satellite links that sustained Lobsang himself.
Or, again, perhaps Lobsang himself was actually ageing, in his own way. After all, nobody knew what would happen to an artificial intelligence as it grew older, as its substrate turned into a thing of layers of increasingly elderly technologies, both hardware and software – ‘accreting like a coral reef’, as Lobsang had once put it – and as its own inner complexity grew ever more tangled. It was an experiment nobody had ever run before.
No wonder then that Lobsang sometimes rambled, almost like a confused and disappointed old man. Well, Agnes was used to confused and disappointed old men; there were plenty of them in the hierarchy of the Church.
Maybe this was why she herself was here. Lobsang had brought her back from the grave to be a kind of adversary, a balance to his ambition. Yes, once upon a time she would undoubtedly have called herself his adversary, even if her role had always been basically constructive. Now, though, she was – well, what? A friend? Yes, of course, but also his confidante and moral compass – the latter being difficult because her own compass had a tendency to spin like a weathercock in a twister.
How was she supposed to have any kind of relationship with such a being? Well, she didn’t know, but she seemed to be finding a way. She had a great deal of confidence in herself. She was resilient. She would cope. She always had.
‘Consider this,’ he was saying now. ‘Humanity got to the moon, and you can’t say that wasn’t a remarkable thing. After all, what other creature has got off the planet? And then, what did Homo sapiens do? Came home again! Bringing a few boxes of rocks, and a smug feeling of being master of the universe . . .’
‘Yes, dear,’ she said automatically.
‘You could argue that such a species deserves to be supplanted by a better breed.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Nearly done. I’ve got some tea in the flasks. Earl Grey or Lady Grey? . . . What are you laughing at?’
Agnes tried to look solemn. ‘At you. For segueing from arguing that humanity deserves extinction to politely asking me whether I would like something so cheerful and normal as a cup of tea! Look – I understand everything you have been saying. Humanity is pretty shallow. It took a trip to the moon for most people even to understand what the Earth really was: round, finite, precious and endangered. We can’t organize ourselves for toffee. But isn’t humanity showing more common sense, even at this late hour? Look how well we’re coping with the Yellowstone disaster – well, so it seems to me.’
‘Hmm. Maybe. Though I’ve seen some hints that we may have had some help . . .’
She dismissed that. ‘Oh, don’t be enigmatic, Lobsang, it’s an irritating habit. And don’t assume that we can’t change – change and grow. Believe me, I’ve seen some fine adults grow out of difficult children; there’s potential in everybody. And, frankly, for all the nonsense you spout about how we’re doomed to be supplanted, I don’t see the new model around anywhere. What happens when they do show up? Should we listen for the sound of jackboots?’
‘Dear Agnes, I know that you exaggerate for effect, a ploy which rarely helps matters. No, not jackboots. Something more – helpful. Well, as I hinted so enigmatically. Imagine something subtler – slow and careful and insidious but not necessarily sinister, and yes, better organized than Homo sapiens could ever be . . .’
But his voice tailed off, and his expression changed, as if he was responding to some distant call.
You had to get used to that happening. He’d told her all about parallel processing, a concept she hadn’t heard of before her reincarnation. This meant running more than one task at once, or breaking down one big job into smaller jobs to be handled simultaneously. Not that she was particularly impressed. After all, she had been doing that all her life, thinking about making dinner while also blowing noses and teaching disturbed children how to hold a conversation and composing yet another angry letter to the bishop, with the occasional prayer thrown in the mix. Who didn’t have to work that way, every day of a busy life?
It did enable her to understand his absences, however. After all, he was steering, as he sometimes said, the narrative of the world.
At length Lobsang snapped back. He didn’t refer to whatever had distracted him, and Agnes did not enquire.
He stood up, stretching his back, wiping his hands. ‘Done – provisionally. You know, I could make this bike the safest in the world. Never skid, never put you in harm’s way . . . What do you say?’
Agnes thought that over before she answered. ‘I’m sure you could, Lobsang. And I’m very impressed, I really am. And touched. But, you see, a motorbike like my Harley doesn’t want to be completely safe. A machine like this develops what can only be called a soul, don’t you think? And you have to let that soul express itself, not hobble it. Let the metal be hot, the engine hungry . . .’
He stood, and shrugged. ‘Well, here’s your machine, complete with its hungry engine. Please drive safely – but that, Agnes, in your case, is a wish, not an expectation.’
So she carefully wheeled the Harley out of the little workshop, and guided the bike through the still-sparse rush-hour traffic of this stepwise world, until she reached open country where she could let the machine play. The wind was strong, but once you got away from the creeping industrialization of this young city – modern-day satanic mills, mostly covered by hoardings and advertisements – you were in a better world, the air cleaner, thoughts less melancholy. Over the roaring of the Harley she sang Joni Mitchell numbers, following roads like black stripes through the snow banks all the way around the frozen lakes of Madison West 5.
When she got back, Lobsang told her that Joshua Valienté had come home. ‘I need to see him,’ Lobsang said urgently.
Agnes sighed. ‘But, Lobsang, Joshua might not be so keen to see you . . .’
5
ON THE DAY OF the launch of the expedition of the Armstrong and Cernan, Capitol Square, Madison West 5, was like a movie set, thought Captain Maggie Kauffman, not without pride.
Here she was with her crew (make that crews) at her side, drawn up in parade order before the steps of the Capitol building, under a clear blue Low-Earth January sky. The air was cold but blessedly free of the Datum’s smog and volcano ash. A presidential podium had been set up before the building’s wooden façade, a very
mid-twenty-first-century image with hovering cameras and a fluttering flag, the holographic Stars and Stripes of America and its stepwise Aegis.
On the stage a few guests waited for the President himself, as he made his latest public appearance at his new capital. There was Admiral Hiram Davidson, commander of USLONGCOM, the Long Earth military command, and Maggie’s own overall superior. Beside him was Douglas Black, short, gaunt, bald as a coot and in heavy sunglasses. Black was a ‘close friend’ of the President as well as a ‘trusted adviser’, the gossip sites said. Translation: moneybags. He always seemed to show up at events like this. But that was the way of the world, as it had been long before Yellowstone, or Step Day.
Up there too was Roberta Golding, the very young, very slim, evidently very smart and now pretty famous young woman who had rocketed from internship to a place in the President’s kitchen cabinet in the space of a few years. Golding, as it happened, had once gone out with the Chinese on their own far-East expedition, as a western student on some kind of scholarship programme. She’d been only fifteen at the time, a rung in the ladder for her spectacular subsequent career. In fact Golding had worked with Maggie’s XO, Nathan Boss, advising on the planning of the new expedition to be launched today. Maggie supposed Golding had earned her place on the platform.
Surrounding the party was the usual apparatus of presidential security, including drone aircraft buzzing overhead, and marines stationed around the podium, heavily armed, watchful, some of them sporadically stepping into neighbouring worlds to keep a check on any threat coming from that invisible direction. Further out, a perimeter of police, military and civilian security kept the crowds at a respectable distance from the action. But these crowds were nothing like the numbers you’d once have got in Datum Washington, DC, Maggie thought, on such a day. They were mostly dressed in clothes befitting a still-young colonial city, coveralls and practical overcoats rather than suits, home-made moccasins and boots rather than patent leather shoes. And there were many, many little kids in their number. Since Yellowstone, indeed long before that great dividing line in history, the populations of the stepwise Americas had been booming, and now Cowley’s own policies with handouts and tax breaks were encouraging bigger families yet.
And beyond that the scattered sprawl of this new Madison spread away. The wide avenues and open development allowed Maggie a view all the way to the lakes that defined the geography of Madison on all the stepwise worlds, calm, ice white rimmed by blue, glittering in the low January sun. Within the framework of the sparse, elegant, very modern city planning bequeathed by this stepwise community’s original founders, smart new establishments that catered for the recent influx of politicos and staffers sat side by side with more practical enterprises, such as stables for your horse, not a hundred yards from the Capitol itself. It was nothing like the clutter of the Datum original before the nuke. But it was a beguiling mix of American traditions old and new.
Nobody begrudged Brian Cowley a Constitution-bending FDR-style third term. The consensus seemed to be that whatever the murky processes that had first propelled Brian Cowley to office back in 2036 – at the head of his destructive, divisive, ‘Humanity First’ anti-stepper movement – he’d stepped up to the plate when the supervolcano had gone up during his innings. Continuity in what was still an ongoing crisis had to be a good strategy, there was no alternative candidate right now who would obviously do a better job – and everybody could see how much the burden was taking out of Cowley himself, who was ageing before everybody’s eyes, live on TV. In fact his unofficial election slogan had been ‘It’s hurting me more than it’s hurting you.’
But with his background as a bar-room barnstormer, he did like to put on a performance.
Joe Mackenzie grumbled to Maggie now, as they waited in the gathering crowd, ‘What’s the man going to do, wait until we all pass out?’
‘Don’t exaggerate, Mac. The whole thing is a show. This expedition of the Armstrong and the Cernan, I mean. And damned expensive. We’ve had to wait for years to do this, while we all worked on the Yellowstone recovery. You can’t blame Cowley for milking the moment, that’s the whole point of it for him.’
‘Hmm,’ Mac grunted sceptically. He glanced around at the crews of the two craft in Maggie’s small squadron, his expression sour. ‘Some expedition.’
Maggie saw her people through his eyes: the Navy crew, the squads of marines adding some muscle. In there was Captain Ed Cutler, whom every man and woman in Maggie’s old command had once seen run nutso in Valhalla. There was the small Chinese contingent in their oddly ill-fitting uniforms, a non-negotiable offering of friendship, cooperation and so forth that had been part of the deal that had delivered the advanced Chinese stepper technologies for the US Navy’s newest ships.
And there were the trolls, three of them, a small family, wearing the armband stripes that designated them as co-opted members of Maggie’s crew. They were visibly unhappy to be stuck in a Low Earth, a world crowded with humanity’s stink and suffused with the peculiar mental pressure that generally kept trolls away from dense human populations – yet here they were, and Maggie allowed herself to be pleased by their loyalty.
But Joe Mackenzie appreciated little of this. Approaching sixty, Mac, a veteran of too many years in inner-city emergency departments and battlefield medicine, had become a walking, talking definition of cynicism, Maggie thought – even if there was nobody else she’d sooner have at her side on this first expedition of Armstrong and Cernan. And now his expression was stony.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Maggie said.
‘Do you?’
‘“What a damn circus.”’
‘That’s the polite version.’
‘Mac, this mission is kind of – complicated. We carry a freight of symbolism. The overt purpose of it is to go further stepwise than any ship before us, even those Chinese ships before Yellowstone. But the deeper meaning is that we’ll be a visible demonstration of the recovery of America – we’ll show that Americans can do more than just shovel ash. Mac, we’ll go down in history.’
‘Or in flames.’
‘And you’ll be there to salve the wounds as always.’
‘Look, Maggie, I know I’m a crusty old bastard. But as far as I’m concerned all this American-destiny stuff is a lot of hooey. Cowley’s only true objective for this trip is just as it was when we went out in the Franklin, all those years ago, when Valhalla was boiling up to rebel. To project federal power across the Aegis. To remind those uppity colonials and combers out there who’s boss. And as far as I’m concerned, our only worthwhile mission objective is to find what became of the crew of the Armstrong I.’
‘Fair enough. Glad to have you aboard anyhow. Oh, by the way, I’m bringing the cat.’
He flared. ‘God dammit, Maggie, why don’t you just stick pins in my eyes?’
Suddenly, shadows from the sky striped across the square.
Maggie tipped up her head to see, and shielded her eyes. Precisely at noon, three airships had appeared above their heads.
The two brand new Navy craft, the USS Neil A. Armstrong II, and the USS Eugene A. Cernan, were whales in the sky. Their predecessors, including Maggie’s own old command the Franklin, based on Long-Mississippi commercial twain technology, had been a little smaller than the venerable Hindenburg. The new Armstrong, like its sister, was nearly half as long again, topping out at more than a thousand feet from stem to stern, not counting a protruding comms antenna and massive tail planes mounted with compact jet engines. The crew liked to brag about how that great envelope could swallow the old Franklin whole, though that wasn’t quite true. But, with Cernan, the ship had taken the record for the largest flying machine ever constructed from the old Hindenburg. Mac had counselled Maggie not to boast too loudly about that, because after all the Hindenburg had been bankrolled by the Nazi party, and ultimately had crashed and burned . . . Maggie had pored over the engineering details as the ships had been designed and constructed, like
a kid in a toy store. Now her heart swelled with pride that two such magnificent ships were hers to command.
And between the Navy ships, stepping in at precisely the same moment in a neat bit of synchronization, was a smaller ship but just as sturdy-looking, its hull painted white and blue with a proud presidential seal emblazoned on its flanks and tail fins. Popularly known as Navy One, this twain was the President’s own dedicated craft, heavily defended and bristling with armour and, it was rumoured, luxuriously appointed within.
Now, with a hum of powerful engines, a soft downwash of air and some neat navigation, Navy One descended towards the Capitol building, and a hatch in the base of the gondola opened up to allow a staircase to extend smoothly to the stage.
With secret service agents front and back, the unmistakable form of Brian Cowley came down the ramp. The band struck up ‘Hail to the Chief’, there were good-natured cheers from the gawking crowd out beyond the perimeter, and Cowley worked his way along the line of dignitaries with handshakes. He was an overweight man in a crumpled suit.
Mac grunted. ‘Look at him with Douglas Black. Jeez, that’s not a handshake, that’s a transfer of DNA. Get a room, Mr President.’
‘Now, now, Mac. Scuttlebutt is that Black bankrolled the building of these ships, the whole damn expedition. You can’t begrudge him his moment in the spotlight.’
‘Yeah, but he probably bankrolled the spotlight too . . .’
At last Cowley stepped up to the microphone, and grinned at the gathering before him. ‘My fellow Americans, and people of the planet Earth – all the planet Earths . . .’
He had always had the easy, graceful command of a natural orator – well, his whole career had been predicated on that one skill – and as his gaze swept over her, Maggie felt herself swell with pride, just a little. Asshole the man might once have been, and might still be, but he was the President, the office was always greater than any one man – and since Yellowstone Cowley had demonstrated that there had been far worse incumbents before him.
The Long Mars Page 5