‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that if even Lobsang couldn’t find anything, there must have been deliberate concealment. By somebody, somehow, for some reason.’ He grinned. ‘I’m suddenly intrigued, Joshua. This is the kind of puzzle that has always attracted me. I found Lobsang himself by following a research trail, you know – even though it turned out that he had engineered the whole thing. And since Lobsang has gone, my world has been rather depleted of conspiracy theories.’
Joshua studied him. ‘You’re thinking of researching this, aren’t you?’
Nelson patted his arm, and stiffly got to his feet. ‘Shall we make some more progress? The many candles on that birthday cake won’t blow themselves out.’
‘True enough.’
‘The many, many candles—’
‘I get it, Nelson.’
‘Hmm. But would you like me to follow this up? This business of your father. Think of it as another birthday present. If you would rather I didn’t—’
Joshua forced himself not to hesitate. ‘Do it.’
‘And if I do find something – considering the circumstances of Maria’s brief life, it could be distressing. One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’
‘Well, I’m a grown-up, Nelson.’ But he did remember how much Lobsang’s revelations about his mother had confounded him. ‘Look, I’ll trust your judgement, whatever you find. On my count, one, two—’
They winked stepwise together, with pops of displaced air.
9
EVEN AS THE airship dropped its anchor at the summit of the low hill that dominated the heart of New Springfield, in a stepwise-parallel version of Maine on Earth West 1,217,756, Agnes could see the neighbours coming to call. She felt oddly nervous, as if she had stage fright. This was the moment her new life would begin, she thought, in this late summer of the year 2054 – nine full years after Lobsang’s ‘death’ – in her new home, with these new people.
Ben, three years old, could see the neighbours coming too. If he stood tall and held on to the rail with his chubby hands, he could just about look out of the gondola’s big observation windows without being lifted up, and being an independent little boy that was what he preferred. And as winches whirred, drawing the twain steadily down its anchor cables towards the ground, Ben jumped up and down, excited.
‘Of course they’d come over,’ Sally Linsay said, standing beside Agnes. ‘That’s what folk do. Check out the newcomer. Welcome you, if possible. Make sure you’re no threat, if necessary.’
‘Hmph. And if we are?’
‘Folk out here have ways of dealing with stuff,’ Sally said quietly. ‘Just remember, this is a big world. Almost all of it choked with jungle, just like this, or thicker. And only a handful of settlements. An easy place to lose problems.’
‘You make an empty world sound almost claustrophobic.’
‘These are good people, as people go. I wouldn’t have advised you to come here otherwise.’
But Sally said this with a kind of amused lilt in her voice, a lilt that had been there from the beginning, when she’d been approached for advice by Lobsang. (Or rather, she was approached by George, Agnes reminded herself, George; he was George Abrahams now and for ever, and she was not Sister Agnes but Mrs Agnes Abrahams, George’s faithful wife. And little Ben was no longer an Ogilvy but an Abrahams too; they had the adoption papers to say so – signed and dated in this year 2054, having waited so many years until the authorities, horribly overstretched in the continuing post-Yellowstone disruption, had finally approved a child for them to cherish …)
Sally had known Lobsang a long time, and she had been somewhat bemused by his choice of a new lifestyle. ‘Lobsang’s having a son? The farming, OK. The cat I can understand. Of course he’d bring Shi-mi. Lobsang and his damn cat. But – a son?’
Agnes had protested, ‘Ben’s orphaned. We will be able to give him a better life than—’
‘Lobsang wants a son?’
‘Lobsang is recovering, Sally. From a kind of breakdown, I think.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t so surprised about that. I suppose he was kind of unique: an antique AI, lots of technological generations all piled up on top of each other. We never ran an experiment like Lobsang before. Complex systems can just crash, from ecologies to economies … But most complex systems don’t come out of it wanting to play happy families.’
‘Don’t be unkind, Sally. He has always served mankind in his way, but from a distance. Now he wants to apprehend humanity more fully. He wants to be human. So we’re going to live in a regular human community, as anonymously as we can. We’re even going to fake illness, ageing—’
‘He already faked his own death.’
‘That was different—’