And over all their heads hovered the massive bulk of a twain: a military airship, the USS Brian Cowley.
The ship hung silent, its turbines idle, the great hull held in place by mooring ropes anchored to the ground. You couldn’t help but be intimidated by the huge ceramic armour plates of its underbelly with their weapons pods and spy-hole observation ports, or by the row of spruce military officers on the ground, who had come down from the ship to tell the folks of New Springfield that they were going to have to leave their home.
Agnes’s fears were fulfilled. From the beginning the meeting didn’t go well.
At Oliver’s invitation the ship’s captain, called Nathan Boss, a stiff-looking forty-something, stood up to make his pitch. ‘If you’ll just let me go through the logic of what we’re trying to do here—’
Somebody yelled, ‘Don’t go through anything. Just go away!’
Catcalls and laughter. That was fair enough, Agnes thought. These people had come out to this world precisely to get away from having smart men in uniforms tell them what to do.
‘We’re here to help you,’ Captain Boss tried now. ‘We came here with a team of scientists to study what’s going on here, in this world. And I brought with me a letter passed on from my own command chain – in fact there is a note for you from President Starling himself—’
‘That crook!’
‘I didn’t vote for him.’
‘The President says that the whole of the extended stepwise nation is with you at this difficult time. We only want to help you—’
‘Then shift that ship and quit blocking the light on my beets!’
More laughter.
Lobsang leaned over to Agnes. ‘Ironically, it’s obvious why they’re so crabby.’
‘Of course it is. Nobody’s getting any decent sleep.’
And they hadn’t for a long time. In the months since Lobsang’s airship jaunt to the south with Joshua, things had worsened dramatically. The length of a day was now down, incredibly, to just twenty hours. Not only that, according to Lobsang who was now measuring such things for himself, the spin-up of the world seemed to be accelerating further.
The nights went by too fast, and it was as if they were all permanently sleep-deprived, or jet-lagged. Of course you could just step away to the neighbouring worlds if you sought a normal day-night sequence – worlds where, bizarrely, sunrise and sunset were drifting out of synch with the home world. But, Agnes had seen it for herself, the more the day here shrank in length, the more people came back to their homes, night after night, as if defying reality, and their own weakness.
‘Stubbornness,’ Agnes said now. ‘Sheer, dogged, Yankee stubbornness. Ain’t no clattering sci-fi monster of a silver beetle going to drive me out of my home.’ For it seemed obvious to everybody that the strange creatures who shared this world must somehow be responsible for the other odd phenomena; you didn’t need to see Lobsang’s global system of metal viaducts to understand that. ‘And the more jet-lagged we get the more stubborn we become.’
‘True, perhaps. And this world is the one the founders chose – this is where they have the bulk of their iron tools, for one thing, even if they were drawn here to an ore seam the beetles’ actions may have created. Why should they give all that up? But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to the advice of the Captain here and his crew. I mean, they did bring a properly equipped science team.’
‘But the Navy wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t called them in, Lobsang.’
‘Somebody had to. I’m concerned, Agnes. Not just for us, not just for this town …’
Agnes glanced down at Ben, who was trying to work a handmade wooden yoyo. He wore a beetle-silver bangle on his wrist, as did most of the kids in this town. And he looked tired, snappy, irritable, just like the rest. She grabbed Lobsang’s hand, synthetic flesh on synthetic flesh, but it felt like a human contact, warm, strong. ‘Look, Lobsang, Oliver Irwin is the mayor of this dump, in all but name. You played your part; you brought in the Navy. Now let Oliver do the talking. Let these others sort it out. Don’t be Lobsang. Be George. Be ordinary. Be Ben’s dad. That’s why we came here, remember. It’s best if everybody figures this out for themselves – makes their own decision about their lives, rather than have you make it for them.’
He took a deep breath, ‘I’ll try, Agnes. I will try.’