As for the people, the storms played hell with the few electronic gadgets they had that still worked. Agnes herself, of course, was a thing of clockwork and gears – that was how she thought of herself anyhow. When the storms came she fretted about how she, Lobsang and indeed Shi-mi might be affected. Lobsang told her not to worry; her innards were well shielded, and her substrates were biochemical rather than metal. Lobsang said that in fact they should be affected less than the standard-issue people around them, whose minds were also linked to their bodies through electromagnetic fields in their brains and nervous systems. That just made her more afraid for Ben, and his growing young body.
Well, Joshua was here now. And, a week after the arrival of the Shillelagh, he and Lobsang were ready to get to work.
Inside the house, Agnes found the two of them sitting at the kitchen table picking over beetle artefacts: silver bangles and pendants, what looked like a small Swiss army knife also wrought in silver, and a shard of smooth black material, curved, broken, like a piece of a smashed Easter egg.
Lobsang looked up. ‘Ben’s playing out back.’
‘Good.’ Agnes bustled around the kitchen, storing the eggs, preparing a fresh pot of coffee. ‘I’ll call him for lunch if he doesn’t come in.’
Joshua said, ‘Well, I guess we’re about ready to go.’
‘Go?’
‘Go tour this world in the Shillelagh,’ Lobsang said. ‘Take a proper look at it, outside of this pinprick we inhabit.’ He shook his greying head. ‘It’s amazing that we’ve done this, in retrospect. You and I, Agnes. Stepped into this one place, in a whole new world, with no real idea what’s over the horizon.’
Joshua said, ‘Well, that’s how most people do it, Lobsang. First light tomorrow, as agreed?’
‘Suits me,’ Lobsang said. ‘It won’t take long to get ready. I’ve packed everything I’ll need from our old gondola into the twain already.’
‘Good,’ Agnes said firmly. ‘But what’s all this junk on my kitchen table?’
‘Samples,’ Lobsang said, and he put his arms around the fragments, as if shielding them from her. ‘We’re trying to be scientific, if belatedly. These are beetle artefacts – given as gifts to the children – and a few scraps we collected from the Gallery, what appear to be detached limbs, even this shard of broken carapace. I was telling Joshua that I’ve put these through the mass spectrometer in the gondola.’
Joshua grinned. ‘A backwoods pioneer with a mass spectrometer. You are a cheat, Lobsang.’
‘But the only scientific equipment I have is what we brought to help service our android bodies – in my Frankenstein laboratory, as Agnes puts it. I had to adapt, improvise … The point is, from their isotopic composition I can tell that these things were made locally, from local substances. The silver was mined a few miles from here. The carapace shard is a kind of ceramic based on river-bed clay from Soulsby Creek. And so on.’
Agnes frowned. ‘I thought you believed these creatures are alien. Not of Earth – of any Earth.’
‘So I do. In form and function they just don’t fit, in any version of the terrestrial tree of life. And, Agnes, I took Joshua through to the Planetarium. Whatever’s going on there, that’s surely a strong hint that these silver beetles have an extraterrestrial origin. But now that they’re here they appear to be making more copies of themselves – breeding, you might call it – using local materials. Stuff from Earth, this Earth.’
Agnes said, ‘What a cheek. This is our world, not theirs.’
‘Quite.’
‘So what does this all mean, Lobsang? What are these creatures up to? And how does it fit in with the days getting shorter?’
‘That’s what we mean to find out.’
‘Well, something’s wrong, that’s for sure; this old planet’s broken down and groaning …’
Joshua, who had known Agnes and her tastes all his life, grinned at that. Lobsang looked confused.
Ben’s soft voice called from outside. ‘George?’
Lobsang pushed back his chair and stood. ‘I’ll go see to him.’
Agnes said, ‘Lunch will be ready soon.’
Joshua stood too. ‘You need a hand, Agnes?’
She waved vaguely. ‘If you like. I’m making chicken soup. Find what you can and improvise.’
He smiled, and began looking out ingredients and implements: vegetables, a chunk of goat’s cheese, seasoning, a sharp knife and a chopping board.
‘You always were a good cook,’ Agnes said. ‘Even when you were no older than Ben is now.’ She looked sideways at him. ‘And you are taking Lobsang’s non-death well, I must say. I know you said you weren’t too surprised, but …’
Joshua grunted. ‘He’s pulled a lot of stunts before. And I was half expecting a call.’
She glanced at him. ‘Why? … Oh. You’re talking about your headaches. The Silence, or the lack of it.’
Joshua had his own peculiar sensitivities to the condition of the Long Earth, it seemed, and had done since he was a boy. When the Sisters had seen him come home from his solo teenage jaunts in distress, they’d tried to tease out of him what he was sensing, feeling: trying to get the ineffable out of the most taciturn boy Agnes had ever met. He would speak of a Silence that wasn’t a Silence, or of a sound that wasn’t there, like an echo from distant mountains … He couldn’t articulate what was evidently an uneasy sense of disturbance that sometimes translated into headaches, storm warnings in his own young head.
‘Do you feel anything now? I mean, here?’
‘Not specifically. It doesn’t work like that, Agnes. This one’s been coming for years, though. Noticed it before my fiftieth birthday, I remember.’ He half-grinned. ‘But when I sensed the thunder clouds gathering, I just knew Lobsang wouldn’t let something as trivial as his own death get in the way of dealing with it.’
‘He did need to recover, Joshua. He was reluctant, in fact, to face up to this business of the silver beetles. It’s a distraction from his – humanity project.’
‘But who else was capable of handling this situation?’
‘Who else, indeed.’
‘And it’s a funny coincidence that, of all the possible locations in the Long Earth, he happens to be right on the spot where he’s most needed. Don’t you think?’
They were here because of Sally Linsay, of course. And Agnes thought back now to Sally’s barely concealed amusement when she had brought them to this place. Had Sally known? … Just as Agnes had always suspected, had Sally been playing some kind of game of her own all the time?
Suddenly angry, she turned away. ‘Whatever you say.’
‘Agnes, you have any garlic?’
‘There’s some dried in the store. We’ve seeded it to grow wild but it hasn’t taken yet …’
That evening they finished loading the Shillelagh. Lobsang and Joshua said their goodbyes to Ben, and Joshua made a gentle fuss of the cat.
The next day they rose at dawn. The boy was still asleep. Agnes, indoors, sitting with a coffee, heard a hiss of gas filling the buoyancy bags, and a whir of turbines. She went to a window, and saw the twain lift.
Soon the ship was lost in the immensity of the sky.
She went back to bed, though she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep again, in what was left of this truncated night.
27
THEY HEADED ROUGHLY south. Running at less than thirty miles per hour, Joshua figured it would take much of the day to reach the Atlantic coast, depending on the precise details of the local geography of this footprint of Maine. Joshua and Lobsang sat side by side in the ship’s battered gondola, which was more like a travel trailer than the spacious liner-like elegance of the Mark Twain, the prototype airship aboard which, more than a quarter of a century before, the two of them had been the first to explore the reaches of the Long Earth, to the High Meggers and beyond.