Ben meanwhile had already started at the informal local school, hosted in the open air, or in one shelter or another, on one world or another. There were only a dozen kids, of all ages from four or five up to fifteen or sixteen. Marina Irwin, mother of Nikos, was the nearest thing to a head teacher, and she had them work and play together as a group, the older ones helping the little ones, and she drafted in adults to teach specific classes, two or three kids at a time. A lot of the focus was on practical skills, from how to pick wild mushrooms, and using the stars to find your way home in the dark, to weapons and hunting classes for the older kids. But there was culture: Marina had a copy of a complete Shakespeare that she made good use of.
As for the adult world, Agnes had soon learned there was no formal law out here. Nobody had a desire to refer disputes to the Datum US government, which in theory still operated its ‘Aegis’ policy, enforcing the laws of the US across all the nation’s Long Earth footprints out to infinity. On the other hand there was no sign of the frontier justice you got in some remote communities. Many Corn Belt towns, for instance, had appointed sheriffs. Here, disputes were solved by mediation: by agreed compensation, with feasts that re-established friendships. None of that was as easy as it sounded, and it all required a hell of a lot of talking. But in such a small group the opposite to forgiveness and reconciliation was a long-standing feud, and nobody wanted that. People spent a lot of time talking through stuff out here – but then, they had the time to spare. And of course if the dispute couldn’t be resolved one or other party could just step away. There would always be room for that final solution …
But right now, Agnes didn’t want to leave.
Alone, she looked around, at this home they were fixing up. They’d got on with it quicker than she might have expected. This room, which Agnes called the parlour, had been done out by Lobsang like a small Buddhist temple, with a polished wooden floor, the walls coated with panels brought from the Low Earths and ornately decorated with red, gold, and splashes of green. All this was a long way from Agnes’s own Catholic tradition, but she liked the sense of symmetry and order, the scent of incense, and the smile on the face of the statue of the Buddha – quite a contrast to the anguished expression of the crucified Christ. And little Ben liked the bright colours, which he said were ‘Christmassy’.
They were happy here, Agnes decided. On balance. Life, as ever, was far from perfect. Sometimes all Agnes could see were the problems. But she had the wider perspective to see that overall, as best she could judge, the people here were getting it more right than wrong. Figuring out a new way of living, based on the long experience of mankind, and their own sturdy common sense. If this was why Sally Linsay had brought them here, it was a good choice.
The only problem was that Agnes was still having trouble sleeping.
She heard voices. Lobsang and Ben returning. She focused on her sewing.
20
IN THE COLD of Datum London, in dusty archives, in badly heated hotel rooms hunched over elderly tablets connected to an unstable web, Nelson Azikiwe continued to follow the tangled story of the Valienté family.
Followed it back more than two centuries, to 1852, and New Orleans …
Luis Valienté had never known a city like ‘Orlins’, as he heard the natives call it. But then, before his first entanglement with Oswald Hackett and his Knights of Discorporea four years ago, he had visited few cities away from his native London: Manchester where he had played a few shows before mobs of mill workers who made Lambeth’s costermongers look like refined gentlemen, and Paris where he had wasted one particularly lavish booking fee on a week of rather bewildered holiday-making.
Now, in the August of 1852, as he and Oswald Hackett and Fraser Burdon strolled through the city, heading for their lodgings with their bits of luggage, he had trouble sorting out his impressions. The heat and the noise, the music and the smiling faces, the stink of the river and the sheer chaos of it all – as a dowdy Englishman he had never felt more out of place in his life.
‘It is like Paris,’ he said at last, reaching for one of the few comparison references he had available. ‘In a way. Look at the architecture; some of it is quite elegant. Spacious and shady – adapted to the climate, of course. And then there’s all the French you hear.’
‘To me it’s more like London,’ Burdon said. ‘Take away the nice weather and ladle on a few centuries of soot, and you might have the East End.’
‘Pah,’ said Hackett, dismissive. ‘To me the whole town is like one ongoing riot. The noise, the colour, the music that blares everywhere – if I could remember my Dante I would probably map it on to one circle of hell or another. One must always remember that none of this existed four hundred years ago. And this is slaving country, and never forget it – why, the largest slave market in America is here. A land of slave-holders and slave-hunters with their Bowie knives and their revolvers, and their bloodhounds and their scourging and their lynching.’
Burdon frowned. ‘We don’t need the piety, thank you, Hackett; we’ve had enough of that from the Prince these last four years. We’re here, aren’t we? We know the job – the mission, as ye call it. Let’s stick to our purpose.’