Sally stood up. ‘While you two pick up your bromance, I’m going for a walk.’
Lobsang’s face was distorted, lopsided. Joshua, watching with fascinated horror, saw that he was trying to smile. ‘Lobsang, you look like a stroke victim.’
‘Sorry. I had no mirrors. I will practise. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody.’
‘No,’ Joshua said carefully. ‘Especially not your son.’
He took that bit of news calmly, nodding, his expression blank. ‘I have been a busy chap, haven’t I? I don’t think a simple synch will be enough this time.’
‘I wouldn’t think so, Lobsang.’
‘Shall we walk?’
So Lobsang completed his preparations, and they left for home.
But by the time Joshua, Sally and Lobsang had completed the long stepwise journey back to New Springfield, the situation there had got a whole lot worse.
45
THE GLOBAL EXPEDITION was Captain Boss’s idea. He would select a diverse group with broad experience and opinions, load them aboard the Cowley, and take them on a brief tour of this suffering world, before coming to a final decision on what to do about the problem of the silver beetles. Joshua thought this Navy captain was either showing a democratic instinct or indecision, depending on your point of view.
So the party gathered outside New Springfield, ready to board the great craft over their heads, enduring an awkward wait for the elevator cage to descend.
Joshua looked around. Alongside himself and Sally, still newcomers to this battered world, here were the science people from the twain crew and its civilian passengers. Agnes stood between two versions of Lobsang, the sombre elderly-gentleman pioneer edition and the battered robot explorer, eerily alike yet unalike. The Irwins, colonials from New Springfield, were here as representatives of their neighbours, who were still stubbornly sitting it out in their lodges on stepwise worlds. The Irwins were very obviously trying not to stare at the ambulant units – they’d only recently learned the truth about their animatronic neighbours.
The newly arrived Lobsang, dressed in a nondescript Navy coverall, was easily distinguished from his twin, at least. For the sake of those who had to look on him, the more obvious flaws in this Lobsang’s visible skin had been roughly patched – but he was still lacking that arm, and one sleeve was neatly sewn flat. Of those present only George, Agnes, Joshua and Sally knew that the right arm wasn’t all this ambulant unit was missing. For Joshua the worst moments had come when the two ambulants had swapped data, at the beginning. They would clasp hands, or stare into each other’s eyes, and Joshua imagined streams of data pouring from their gel-based processing cores through the medium of their touching palms, or chattering in sparks of light between their eyes, as they synched their understanding.
And, to complete the group, here was a young man in a homburg hat who called himself simply Marvin, standing beside a middle-aged woman, brisk, sturdy, competent-looking, named Stella Welch. Dressed simply, plainly spoken, these were representatives of the Next, somehow summoned by Lobsang. They looked very ordinary to Joshua, but then he’d only met immature Next before, like Paul Spencer Wagoner. The sun cream, dark glasses and floppy hats they all had to wear out in the open – the extreme winds had thrown water vapour high into the stratosphere and broken down the ozone layer – did nothing to add to the authority of the Next.
‘I imagined Vulcans,’ Joshua admitted to Sally.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Look at us. What a crew. Three androids, the egghead science types, two blank-eyed brainiacs, two bewildered Mom-and-Pop homesteaders – and two lifelong misfits in me and thee, Joshua.’
Agnes said dryly, ‘It’s like a Traveling Wilburys reunion tour.’
That made ‘George’ laugh.
His one-armed twin ‘Lobsang’, though, looked puzzled. That was another difference between them. Maybe his knowledge of late-twentieth-century rock bands, always an essential around Sister Agnes, had eroded away during his decades with the Traversers. Indeed this long-lost copy of Lobsang had been staggered to meet Agnes in the first place, and even more so to discover why his successors had had her reincarnated. The Lobsangs had diverged, interestingly.
The Irwins glanced over, as if offended by the laughter, as well they might be. Agnes had told Joshua something of how it had been when ‘George’ had finally revealed his and Agnes’s true nature. All Agnes could do was apologize to the neighbours she had deceived – and who now kept their kids away from her as if she was about to turn Terminator.