‘Interesting,’ Lobsang said.
She managed to laugh. ‘What, one thing in particular as opposed to all the rest?’
‘The sky. Those green-tinged stars. On one side of the sky, not the other. Now, why that odd asymmetry?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She pushed away Lobsang’s arm. Nikos was watching her; she felt embarrassed by the weakness she had shown.
‘Take me home,’ she said sternly.
At their cabin, Shi-mi was waiting for them by the door. She seemed to be bursting with news.
The cat said without hesitation, ‘I was able to observe your experiments. The pendulum and the timer funnels and the sundial. I have come to a conclusion. I regret that the precision is uncertain—’
‘That’s OK,’ Agnes said. ‘Just tell me.’
‘When we came here the day was twenty-four hours long. Just as on all the worlds of the Long Earth – well, almost all. I remember that well; I observed it myself. But now—’ And she shuddered.
Agnes crouched down. ‘Shi-mi, are you all right? Let me get you something.’
‘No. Please, Agnes.’ She opened her green eyes wide. ‘Now, according to your clocks, the day is shorter. Twenty-three hours only, plus a few minutes. You were right. You were right …’
Agnes stared at Lobsang. ‘The silver beetles. The Planetarium. Now this, the world spinning faster on its damn axis. What does it mean, Lobsang?’
‘I’ll have to find out.’ He sighed. ‘So much for the homesteading.’
‘To find out – what do you need to do that?’
‘A twain,’ he said. ‘I need a twain, so I can see the whole world. And Joshua Valienté, Agnes. I need Joshua.’
23
FOR NELSON AZIKIWE, patiently enquiring, the mysteries of the deeper history of Joshua Valienté and his family continued to unravel …
Luis Valienté never forgot his adventure with Abel and Simon, the runaway slaves, back in 1852. It was an incident that had made him proud to be British, and indeed to be a Waltzer, one of Oswald Hackett’s Knights of Discorporea. A validation too, for the first time in his life, of what he was.
But as the years passed, he gradually became less and less entangled in the affairs of the Knights, and his life followed its own distinct path.
That path took a decisive turn thanks to his share in a fictitious Californian gold mine – all Fraser Burdon’s doing, of course – a lode easily extracted thanks to their piggybacking on the results of some poor fellow’s five years of prospecting in the true California. Luis marvelled at Fraser’s ingenious cover-up of their strike’s peculiar provenance. The mine, according to Fraser’s account for the authorities, had supposedly been opened up by a ‘distant cousin’. Its location had been ‘lost’, along with all documentation, in a botched robbery attempt when the ‘cousin’ had come into town and attempted to register his latest ‘strike’ … They got away with it. There were, it seemed, even wilder stories than that circulating in the strange subculture of the Gold Rush.
And suddenly Luis was rich.
Luis invested his gold money in the burgeoning field of steam engines, for, just as the railways were spreading their iron web around the world, so the oceans, the oldest transport highways of all, were being challenged by a new generation of ships driven by coal and steam, ever since the pioneering service of the Great Western from 1838. Unlike his father, Luis managed to invest well and wisely, on the whole – well enough that he could afford to dabble in another nostalgic passion, backing variety shows in the theatres of England.
He did learn that Burdon had sunk much of his money into armaments – a growing industry after decades of relative peace in Europe were ended by the brutal war in the Crimea. After that conflict, during his visits to London, Luis often noticed a veteran who had a pitch at a corner of the New Cut, a one-legged fellow who would ape army routines, marching and standing to attention and shouldering arms with his crutch. He wore a medal of some kind, and Luis wondered if he might have met the Queen herself, who had taken a great interest in the war, and had met the troops and handed out the gongs … Old folk would tell you there had been a flood of such figures a few decades back, after the war against Bonaparte. They had all died off since, but now there was a fresh crop.
Armaments! Burdon, he supposed, had always had an air of brutal realism about him that Luis lacked, for better or worse.