Agnes took Joshua’s hand. ‘It’s going to be a long ride home, isn’t it? You, me, Martha, Rocky. The other survivors of all this. It’s Rocky I feel for the most.’

‘Well, that’s you, Agnes. Always drawn to the damaged children.’

‘Isn’t that a good instinct? Believe me, the damage that’s already been done to that boy will haunt him through his life. Even after his death he’ll probably be vilified for his betrayal. There are precedents, you know.’ She turned reluctantly to George, still clinging to his arm. ‘But you – must you stay?’

He smiled, an elderly, elegant, kindly gentleman, wearing scuffed, sturdy frontier clothes, like Agnes’s. ‘Well, we’ve been through this, Agnes. I can’t take part in the Cauterizing itself. But I, with my long-lost brother, did contribute a great deal to the theory – to the mathematics. And since the operation is largely mathematical, I can lend a great deal of support to—’

‘It doesn’t have to be you. You have a spare.’ And Agnes glanced over at the second copy of Lobsang, the ambulant unit from the world of the Traversers. He, it, wore a modest coverall, that one sleeve sewn up. He stood apart from the group, utterly still, statue-like, younger in appearance than George, his face empty of expression. ‘He knows everything you do.’

‘Yet we’re not identical, and never can be.’

‘Why stay? For the science? You’ll be trapped behind the Cauterizing. You’ll never be able to report back. Never be able to synch, to download your memories into those big banks at your transEarth Institute or—’

‘There may be a way, some day. Why, Stella Welch and the Cowley science staff have seeded this world with probes and data-gathering equipment, with the same reservations in mind. You may as well measure what you can, even if you’re not sure you can retrieve the data. And besides—’ For a moment, a very human resentment twisted his artificial face. He said more thickly, ‘Agnes, this was our world. My world, my home, with you. Now it is threatened with destruction. I will be the only one of us homesteaders who can be present. I am not the man I was before I came here with you, Agnes. I have invested much of myself in this place – as did we all, the Irwins and the rest, the Poulsons before them. I must see this. I must remember. As best I can.’

Agnes took his hands in hers. ‘What about all you “invested” in Ben? You should have seen him when I left him, an eight-year-old boy alone in a cabin on a military airship, crying his heart out.’

‘There’s nothing more I could do for him. Nothing more I could say.’

Joshua said, ‘At least you’ll be out of reach of the prosecutors, after you’ve once again saved civilization as we know it.’

George grinned. ‘Even now, old-movie gags, Joshua?’

Joshua, giving in to an impulse, went over to the ambulant and hugged him. ‘In spite of everything I’ll miss you.’

‘Please, Joshua. Not in front of the Next.’

Agnes snapped, ‘Oh, you’re impossible, the pair of you.’

George glanced now at his Navy-issue watch, its presence on his wrist a symbol of a definitive break from the timeless ethos of New Springfield. ‘Please excuse me, there are final preparations …’ Gently he disengaged his arm from Agnes’s. ‘We’ll still have time before you go.’ He walked away.

Joshua put his arm around Agnes’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s typical of Lobsang that as soon as I decide I’m leaving him, he leaves me. But the truth is I lost him the day the Cowley came, and he took it on himself to speak up for the community. Or maybe when the problems with this world became too obvious to ignore. Or maybe I never had him at all – thanks to Sally Linsay, who planted us on this doomed world in the first place, and I’m damn sure she knew what she was doing.’

Joshua shrugged. ‘She may have felt she had no choice. That’s what the Next say. They can see their way through to an optimal end to the game, and so have no choice about how to play it. I sometimes think there’s something of the Next in Sally. If she glimpsed this end-game all the way back then, if she sensed something wrong here, well, she was right, wasn’t she? And if that’s true, she’s paying the price herself.’

‘Good,’ Agnes said with almost a snarl, and Joshua was taken aback. ‘There,’ she said more calmly. ‘I got that out of my system. Now I can forgive her … And here she comes, right on cue. I’ll give you some time together.’ Agnes squeezed Joshua’s hand, and walked away after George, without another glance at Sally.

Joshua and Sally faced each other. As ever she wore her travelling gear, her shapeless hat, her sleeveless jacket with all the pockets, her pack on her back, ready to move.

‘So this is it,’ Joshua said.

‘I guess.’

‘You really have to stay?’

She shrugged. ‘Stan has the raw ability, but I’m the more experienced stepper. They need me to help him.’ She seemed calm, accepting. ‘I always suspected it would finish up like this.’

He looked inside himself. ‘After all we’ve been through together, I don’t know what I feel.’

‘Then stop picking the scab,’ she said sternly.

‘It seems like yesterday when we first met.’

‘When I found you.’

‘In our flying penis, as you called our airship. In the High Meggers. You and your pet dinosaurs basking in the sun.’

‘Ancient history.’

‘We had lunch. Fresh-caught oysters on an open fire, on that distant beach.’

‘I guess I’m heading for another kind of beach now, Joshua.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Still alive, as far as I know. Made a fortune out of his patents on the beanstalk tech we brought back from Mars.’

Joshua frowned. ‘I meant, why isn’t he here? Does he know? About this, about you? Did you try to contact him?’

She shrugged. ‘He’ll know all about it. He always did know everything. If he wanted to be here, he would be.’

‘But did you try—’

‘Leave it, Joshua. My business. As for you, remember me to Helen. That little mouse.’

‘She was always wary of you, you know.’

‘Of course she was. To her, I was a symbol of the side of you she could never reach, and she knew it. She was good for you, Joshua. But we make our own choices.’

‘I guess that’s true. But I take it that right now you have no choice—’

‘Not with this. I never did have. Not from the first moment I heard about the problems on this world.’

‘And you brought Lobsang here. What did you hear? How?’

But Sally, who had always been immersed in her own networks of information spanning the Long Earth, had never answered questions like that, and didn’t now.

‘Anyhow, because of that, I’m going to lose you,’ he said gently.

She grinned. ‘Don’t go soft on me now, Valienté.’

‘Sally—’

‘Be seeing you.’

And she disappeared, vanishing stepwise, as precociously and abruptly as she had always done, from their very first meeting on the beach with the oysters and the dinosaurs.

52

IN THE RUINS of New Springfield, when the Cowley and its passengers had stepped away at last, the three left behind stood alone.

Sally took a deep breath. ‘It’s amazing how different a world feels when you’re alone in it. Refreshing.’

Lobsang – the replicant formerly known as George Abrahams – grunted. ‘You’re turning into Joshua.’

‘I’ll take that as an insult.’

‘Well, I think it’s a relief,’ said Stan Berg. ‘That it’s done, at last. The goodbyes. Now we can get on with the job.’ His voice was flat, his face expressionless.

Sally exchanged a glance with Lobsang. Suddenly this man, this boy – this super-intellect of the Next, this prophet, this mother’s son – seemed very young indeed. Young and scared. And he had a right to be, Sally thought. Yet, despite his youth, he had taken on this responsibility, and faced the tears of his mother, because he had seen the danger, presumably, more clearly than any of them. That was the curse of Next intelligence: you had no comforting delusions.