Joshua made to hush her.
But Lobsang said, ‘No, let her speak. She’s right. This has been a difficult time for me. You know that as well as anybody, Joshua. And in fact that’s the reason I allowed Agnes to call you all together.’
Agnes stiffened. ‘Oh, you allowed it, did you? And there was me thinking this was all my idea.’
Lobsang looked at them in turn, at Sally, Nelson, Joshua, Agnes, Sister John. ‘You are my family. That’s how I think of you all. Yet you have family ties of your own. You mustn’t neglect them.’ He turned to Nelson. ‘You, too, are not as alone as you thought you were, my friend.’
Nelson looked intrigued rather than offended at this opacity. ‘Textbook enigmatic. Typical Lobsang!’
‘I don’t mean to be obscure. If you just think back to when we went to New Zealand—’
Evidently frustrated at this hijacking of her party, Agnes interrupted sharply. ‘Lobsang, if you’ve something to say you’d better get to the point.’
Lobsang sat forward, shoulders hunched. Suddenly he looked, to Joshua, unaccountably old. Old and tired. ‘Yellowstone, and the collapse of the Datum, were hard for me. I suffuse the Long Earth, I have iterations scattered across the solar system, but my centre of gravity was always Datum Earth. Now the Datum itself is grievously wounded. And so, as a consequence, am I.’ He pressed his thumbs into his temples. ‘Sometimes I feel incomplete. As if I am losing memories, and then losing the memory of the loss itself … Yellowstone to me was like a lobotomy.
‘Since then I have had – doubts. I told you of this, Joshua. I have had the odd sensation that I remembered my previous incarnations. But that is not the accepted norm, under the Tibetan tradition; if my reincarnation has been fully successful I should shed all memory of my previous lives. Perhaps this reincarnation is imperfect, then. Or,’ he glanced at Agnes, ‘perhaps there is some more mundane explanation. I am after all nothing but a creature of electrical sparks in distributed stores of Black Corporation gel. Perhaps I have been hacked.
‘And then came the Next, and their verdict on me. Before all this, I imagined I would become – yes, Sally! – omnipresent, omniscient. Why not? All of mankind’s computer systems, all communications, would ultimately be integrated into one entity – into me. And I would cradle all of you in safety and warmth, for evermore.’
Sally snorted. ‘An evermore of subordination? No thanks.’
He looked at her sadly. ‘But what of me? Without my dream I am nothing.’
Carefully he put down his teacup.
Agnes was clearly alarmed by this small gesture. ‘What do you mean, Lobsang? What are you going to do?’
He smiled at her. ‘Dear Agnes. This will not hurt, you know. It is just that I—’
He froze. Just stopped, mid-motion, mid-sentence.
Agnes cried, ‘Lobsang? Lobsang!’
Joshua rushed to his side, with Agnes. As Joshua held Lobsang’s shoulders, Agnes rubbed his hands, his face: synthetic hands on synthetic cheeks, Joshua thought, and yet the emotion could not have been more real.
Lobsang’s head turned – just his head, like a ventriloquist’s dummy – to Joshua, first. ‘I have always been your friend, Joshua.’
‘I know …’
Now Lobsang looked up at Agnes. ‘Don’t be afraid, Agnes,’ he whispered. ‘It is not dying. It is not dying—’
His face turned slack.
For a moment there was stillness.
Then Joshua became aware of a change in the background, the soft, routine sounds of the Home: a ceasing of noise, of the humming of invisible machines, of fans and pumps. A closing down. Glancing out of the window, he saw lights flicker and die in the building opposite. Whole blocks growing dark further out. Somewhere an alarm bell sounded.
Agnes grabbed Lobsang’s shoulders and shook him. ‘Lobsang! Lobsang! What have you done? Where have you gone? Lobsang, you bastard!’
Sally laughed, stood up, and stepped away.
Of course even Lobsang had never known it all. Some of the mysteries of Joshua’s own peculiar nature were hidden, it would turn out, not in the stepwise reaches of the Long Earth but deep in time. Mysteries that had begun to tangle up as early as March 1848, in London, Datum Earth: