‘Us and you, again,’ Rocky said bitterly. ‘Stan’s a poppy growing in a weed patch, right?’

‘Not at all,’ she said blandly.

Martha said, ‘And you’re offering Stan a place with you in this – Grange?’

‘We’re offering him the chance to come visit us. See if he thinks he will be happy there.’

‘Suppose he isn’t,’ Rocky said. ‘Suppose he wants to come home. Will you let him?’

‘Of course. It’s not a prison, or—’

‘But he’ll know where you are. You said they already tried to blow you up once.’

Roberta said gently, ‘Stan could not expose us without exposing himself. He’s far too intelligent to do any such thing. Isn’t that true, Stan?’

Stan hadn’t spoken since first being introduced to Roberta. ‘Talking to you is interesting. Like a chess game, almost. We can both see our way to the end game.’

She nodded, smiling. ‘That is an acute perception. In a way it is as if we have less free will than these others. Because we can think our way through a given situation, discarding inappropriate alternatives.’

‘These others,’ Rocky said. ‘You keep saying it.’

‘But,’ Roberta said to Stan, ‘we do debate higher issues. Goals. Motivations. That’s where our differences are expressed. At the level of strategy, not tactics.’

Stan nodded. ‘And what is your strategy? What are your motivations? What do you intend for humanity?’

Martha said hotly, ‘Isn’t that up to us?’

‘No, Mom,’ Stan said evenly. ‘Not with people like this in the world. You’re no more in control of your own destiny than an elephant on a game reserve. That’s a good analogy, isn’t it?’ he said, challenging Roberta. ‘With you as the wardens.’

‘It’s not like that. At least, not all of us think that way. Certainly we want mankind to be … happy.’

‘Happy? Wandering around without purpose, in a kind of garden, perfected by you. A Long Utopia. Is that your goal?’

‘We don’t have a goal,’ Roberta said. ‘At least, not an agreed one. We are developing our capabilities, exploring our own motivations. The debate on objectives continues. I invite you to join that debate. If you care about humanity as much as you seem to—’

‘I need to think.’ Stan stood, abruptly. ‘Excuse me.’ He stepped away.

When he’d gone, the room seemed empty.

Martha poured more iced tea. She said, ‘He’ll go with you. I don’t have to be a super-brain to know that much. I know my son. He’ll go, if only out of curiosity. But he’ll come home again.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Roberta. ‘But I think you should be prepared to lose him. I’m very sorry.’

Martha looked away, evidently unable to speak.

16

NELSON AZIKIWE HAD said, when offering to research Joshua’s family, ‘One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’ Maybe, but it turned out to be a mighty stubborn thread.

It took months that stretched, surprisingly, to years – four years after the promise he’d made on Joshua’s fiftieth birthday – before Nelson was able to make much progress with his search. His breakthrough came not through such networks as his online buddies the Quizmasters, but through his acquaintance with Lobsang – in fact, through an old friend of Sister Agnes, who heard through shared friends, she said, that Nelson was looking for information about ‘London’s scandalous past’.

For, to Nelson’s surprise, his investigations had led him to that battered city.

Nelson met Miss Guinevere Perch in a Long Earth footprint of London. A couple of steps from the frozen Datum ruin, this new community was a tangle of hastily erected refugee camps cut into oak forest. A contemporary of Agnes, Miss Perch was in her nineties now, withered, birdlike, her hair a tangle, but with a beaming smile for visitors. She lived alone, though with daily assistance, in a house built in a fairly crude Low Earth colonial style. But she dressed richly, and in a room filled with exotic furniture a peripatetic butler served Nelson tea and cake.

Miss Perch gleefully showed Nelson images of the properties she had once owned on the Datum, including a very expensive Georgian terrace house in central London. ‘Handy for the House of Commons,’ she said. And when she showed him glimpses of the exotic equipment she had kept in the basement of that terrace house, and outlined the activities that went on down there for the benefit of MPs and other parliamentarians – and a visitors’ book, complete with covert photographic portraits, that spanned decades – he understood why she had got in touch with him. When it came to what was left of the British Establishment, even now, sixteen years after Yellowstone, Miss Guinevere Perch knew where the bodies were buried.

And with that power, she was able to help Nelson uncover some very private secrets indeed.

But as it turned out, when Nelson did begin to tug systematically on the thread of Joshua Valienté’s origins, the story he unravelled went much deeper than the biography of Joshua’s own father. It turned out to be a history, in fact, more than two centuries old …

From the stage door of the Victoria theatre and down Lambeth’s crowded New Cut, the Great Elusivo – a.k.a. Luis Ramon Valienté, a.k.a. the Hon. Reginald Blythe, and a.k.a. a variety of other pseudonyms depending on circumstances – followed his mysterious interrogator, Oswald Hackett, towards the promised oyster-house.

The pavements of the New Cut, banks of a river of horse-drawn traffic, swarmed with people and their multifarious business. Of course they did at this time of a Saturday evening, in March of the year 1848, when the Surrey-side theatres opened their doors to let out the posh folk from the boxes, and the young costermongers swarmed out of the threepenny stalls. The shops were all open, the keepers in their doorways, the windows full of furniture or tools or second-hand clothes, or heaps of vegetables or cheese or eggs. But there was as much business being done from the stalls that crowded the street itself. The repetitive cries of the stall vendors or their boys rose up over the clatter of horses’ hooves: ‘Chestnuts, penny a scoop!’ and ‘Pies all ’ot!’ and ‘Yarmouth herrings three a penny!’ Many of these voices were Irish; the destitute folk of that country had come to the city fleeing the famine, and were looked down on even by the poorest of the indigenous folk. More elaborate sermons came from the cheap Johns selling Sheffield-steel cutlery in their thick Yorkshire accents, and the patterers talking up their gaudy literature of gruesome crimes. Luis had to sidestep an old woman seated on a low stool, smoking a pipe, selling framed engravings of Queen Victoria, her Consort and her children from an upturned umbrella. The street entertainers were everywhere too, the ballad singers and the sword swallowers and fire eaters, an old blind woman playing a hurdy-gurdy, and one man with a tabletop display of mechanical figures from Austria, a princess dancing the polka, a trumpeting elephant, which held the attention of rapt street children …

Amid all this clamour, Luis kept his eye on the mysterious Hackett.

Luis was a quick study. Oswald Hackett was a powerfully built man in his thirties, some years older than Luis, dressed richly but soberly in a handsome-looking surtout, and walking with an expensive cane. In the light of the lamp by the stage door Luis had noticed that the skin of the hand holding that cane bore marks, scars made by chemicals perhaps. Was the fellow some kind of scholar, a scientist – a chemist? And educated by the sound of it; he had the slight bray, the elongated vowels, that Luis associated with a history shaped by Harrow and Oxford.

Right now the man looked somewhat sickened: pale, breathing hard as he marched along. But this March day was unseasonably warm, and the London air was a touch less sulphurous than usual – the reaction must be due to after-effects of the man’s own disappearing act rather than to the climate. Still, Hackett kept pushing through the crowd, by an apparent effort of will.