Stan hadn’t spoken since first being introduced to Roberta. ‘Talking to you is interesting. Like a chess game, almost. We can both see our way to the end game.’
She nodded, smiling. ‘That is an acute perception. In a way it is as if we have less free will than these others. Because we can think our way through a given situation, discarding inappropriate alternatives.’
‘These others,’ Rocky said. ‘You keep saying it.’
‘But,’ Roberta said to Stan, ‘we do debate higher issues. Goals. Motivations. That’s where our differences are expressed. At the level of strategy, not tactics.’
Stan nodded. ‘And what is your strategy? What are your motivations? What do you intend for humanity?’
Martha said hotly, ‘Isn’t that up to us?’
‘No, Mom,’ Stan said evenly. ‘Not with people like this in the world. You’re no more in control of your own destiny than an elephant on a game reserve. That’s a good analogy, isn’t it?’ he said, challenging Roberta. ‘With you as the wardens.’
‘It’s not like that. At least, not all of us think that way. Certainly we want mankind to be … happy.’
‘Happy? Wandering around without purpose, in a kind of garden, perfected by you. A Long Utopia. Is that your goal?’
‘We don’t have a goal,’ Roberta said. ‘At least, not an agreed one. We are developing our capabilities, exploring our own motivations. The debate on objectives continues. I invite you to join that debate. If you care about humanity as much as you seem to—’
‘I need to think.’ Stan stood, abruptly. ‘Excuse me.’ He stepped away.
When he’d gone, the room seemed empty.
Martha poured more iced tea. She said, ‘He’ll go with you. I don’t have to be a super-brain to know that much. I know my son. He’ll go, if only out of curiosity. But he’ll come home again.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Roberta. ‘But I think you should be prepared to lose him. I’m very sorry.’
Martha looked away, evidently unable to speak.
16
NELSON AZIKIWE HAD said, when offering to research Joshua’s family, ‘One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’ Maybe, but it turned out to be a mighty stubborn thread.
It took months that stretched, surprisingly, to years – four years after the promise he’d made on Joshua’s fiftieth birthday – before Nelson was able to make much progress with his search. His breakthrough came not through such networks as his online buddies the Quizmasters, but through his acquaintance with Lobsang – in fact, through an old friend of Sister Agnes, who heard through shared friends, she said, that Nelson was looking for information about ‘London’s scandalous past’.
For, to Nelson’s surprise, his investigations had led him to that battered city.
Nelson met Miss Guinevere Perch in a Long Earth footprint of London. A couple of steps from the frozen Datum ruin, this new community was a tangle of hastily erected refugee camps cut into oak forest. A contemporary of Agnes, Miss Perch was in her nineties now, withered, birdlike, her hair a tangle, but with a beaming smile for visitors. She lived alone, though with daily assistance, in a house built in a fairly crude Low Earth colonial style. But she dressed richly, and in a room filled with exotic furniture a peripatetic butler served Nelson tea and cake.
Miss Perch gleefully showed Nelson images of the properties she had once owned on the Datum, including a very expensive Georgian terrace house in central London. ‘Handy for the House of Commons,’ she said. And when she showed him glimpses of the exotic equipment she had kept in the basement of that terrace house, and outlined the activities that went on down there for the benefit of MPs and other parliamentarians – and a visitors’ book, complete with covert photographic portraits, that spanned decades – he understood why she had got in touch with him. When it came to what was left of the British Establishment, even now, sixteen years after Yellowstone, Miss Guinevere Perch knew where the bodies were buried.
And with that power, she was able to help Nelson uncover some very private secrets indeed.
But as it turned out, when Nelson did begin to tug systematically on the thread of Joshua Valienté’s origins, the story he unravelled went much deeper than the biography of Joshua’s own father. It turned out to be a history, in fact, more than two centuries old …