The Long War Read online

  Helen kissed him on the cheek. ‘Go now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just go see her. Never mind some invitation from the Home. Go for yourself. You’ll feel better for it. And don’t worry about us. We’re not going anywhere. I’m not, anyhow . . .’

  He slept on that.

  Then, the next day, he went.

  In Madison West 5, this new city that was growing up to replace the bombed-out hulk of the old – based on a new post-Step Day urban development where, as it happened, Helen had briefly lived with her family before their stepwise trek – the Home had been duplicated meticulously, aside from having various flaws fixed; Joshua himself had given over some money to see to that. Sister Agnes had lived to oversee the rebuilding.

  And then she had died, in the autumn sunlight of a new Earth. She had been buried in the sight of plenty of important people – some of whom, Joshua knew, would frankly have liked to see her dead a lot earlier.

  For now, her body had a brand-new cemetery plot all to itself. It was a clear, bright May afternoon when Joshua arrived with his bouquet and placed it dutifully on the stone, in this small plot outside the Home. There were flowers here already, from the Sisters themselves, and from other grown-up inmates who had benefited from Agnes’s indefatigable patience, her thoughtful love.

  He lost track of time, alone for once, not moving. If he was spotted by anybody within the quiet Home, he wasn’t disturbed.

  He was surprised to notice the shadows starting to lengthen, the afternoon drawing on. He left the little graveyard, to start the long walk back to Jansson’s.

  And he saw a figure standing across the road. A woman in a nun’s habit, just standing, apparently watching him. He crossed the road. He couldn’t see her face; she looked youngish. ‘Can I help you, Sister?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been away . . .’ Her voice was a soft brogue. ‘I only learned of Agnes’s death recently . . . Would you be Joshua Valienté, by any chance? Your face is familiar from the news. Oh dear me, where are my manners? I am Sister Conception. Agnes and me, we went back a long way. In fact we took our vows together. I knew she would become a force in the world, always knew it, even though she could be a mouthy madam . . .’

  Joshua stayed silent.

  ‘Sister Conception’ took a long look at Joshua’s face. ‘It isn’t working, is it?’

  ‘Well, if you want me to think that you aren’t who you really are, no. I’d know her in the pitch dark. I can remember her walking through the dormitory every night, before standing at the door and turning the light out. The click of that old Bakelite switch, held together with glue because there was never any money for a rewiring. The way she made us all feel safe . . . Besides, she never was a good liar. Or any good at an Irish accent.’

  ‘Joshua—’

  ‘I think I can work it out. Lobsang?’

  ‘Lobsang.’

  ‘A stunt like this is just like him. And it was me who brought him in to see Agnes when she was dying. All my fault, probably. And now – well, here you are.’

  ‘Joshua—’

  ‘Hello, Agnes.’ He threw his arms around her, until she burst out laughing and pushed him away.

  26

  FOR AGNES, IT had begun with a wakening. She had felt a gentle warmth, and a certain sense of pink.

  She thought this over for an indeterminate time. The last thing she remembered was her own bed, in the Home, the murmuring of a priest. She said, more cautiously than hopefully, ‘And I am in heaven?’

  ‘No. Heaven can wait,’ said a male voice calmly. ‘We have more urgent matters to consider.’

  Sister Agnes whispered (although she wasn’t sure how she whispered), ‘And will there be a band of angels?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said the firmament. ‘But top marks for getting in a reference to the works of the late Jim Steinman in your first minute of revived consciousness. Now, alas, you must sleep again.’ And darkness returned to cover the firmament, and as it faded the firmament said, ‘Amazing . . .’

  What was most amazing was that all this was spoken in Tibetan. And that she understood.

  More time passed.

  ‘Agnes? I have to wake you again for a little while, just for calibration . . .’

  That was when they showed Agnes her new body: pink, naked, raw, and very female.

  ‘Who ordered those?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Look – even before my bosom headed south for the winter, I assure you it wasn’t that size. Can you please tone it down a little?’

  ‘Don’t worry. All things are mutable. If you will bear with us, we will eventually be able to present you with a suite of bodies for all occasions. All prosthetic, of course. You’ll certainly pass as human; things have got a lot more sophisticated since I began my own experiments. Although quite a lot of you, technically speaking, will not be human. Incidentally you are being attended by a number of surgeons and other medical personnel in the pay of a little-known subsidiary of the Black Corporation. They have no idea of your identity. Fun, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fun?’ Suddenly Agnes knew exactly who was doing this to her. ‘Lobsang! You bastard!’

  The dark rose up again. But her anger stayed: the anger she had always looked on as an ally, anger that filled her up. She clung to that heat now.

  Eventually the pinkness returned.

  And the voice of Lobsang spoke again, gently. ‘My apologies once more, but this is a very delicate procedure – what you might call the endgame. I have been working on your revival for three years, and now it’s nearly done. Sister Agnes, dear Agnes, you have nothing to fear. Indeed I expect to meet you in person after breakfast tomorrow. While you wait, would you care for some music?’

  ‘Not more bloody John Lennon.’

  ‘No, no. Knowing your taste – what is your position on the works of Bonnie Tyler?’

  Sister Agnes woke up yet again, bewildered. Bewildered, and smelling coffee and bacon and eggs.

  The scent emanated from a tray close by the bed on which she lay, evidently placed there by a young lady – bespectacled, friendly, Asiatic, perhaps Japanese. ‘There is no hurry, madam. Take your time. My name is Hiroe. Please ask for anything you desire.’

  In fact coming back to life seemed to get easier as it went along. With Hiroe’s help she made her way to the bathroom of what appeared to be a bland hotel suite, took a shower, stared at her perfect teeth in the mirror, and voided her bowels of nothing very much.

  Hiroe said, ‘You should find physical matters easy. We took your body through many basic processes while you were in deep sleep. Training it, so to speak. Would you be so kind as to walk up and down for a while, and tell me what you feel?’

  Sister Agnes did indeed walk around, and gave her report. She tasted the coffee, which wasn’t bad at all, and was surprised to find that the bacon was crisp to the point of charcoal, just as she had always liked it.

  And then there was a closet full of clothing, including a habit of the kind she had worn for so many years. She hesitated. As a Catholic nun somewhat estranged from her Church’s orthodoxy, if she had been uncertain of her theological status before all this, she was bewildered now. But she had made her vows long ago, and she supposed they still applied, so she donned the garment. And as she dressed she smiled, enjoying the surcease of old-age pain in every joint, a feeling of liberty of movement long forgotten.

  She said to the Japanese girl, ‘I imagine I have an appointment with Lobsang himself?’

  Hiroe laughed. ‘Well done! He said that you would be quick to get to the point. If you would kindly follow me . . .’

  Agnes followed the girl along a steel-walled corridor, passed through a series of doors which opened and closed with a certain automated panache, and was ushered into a room full of books and antique furnishings – it might have been Charles Darwin’s study, down to the blazing fire in an antique hearth. But it was a place Agnes recognized, from Joshua’s description of a similar experience. Lobsang ch
ic, it seemed.

  Across the room was a swivel chair, heavily stuffed, with its back to her.

  She snapped, ‘It’s fake, isn’t it? The fire. Joshua told me about it. He said it wasn’t randomized properly.’

  There was no answer from the swivel chair.

  ‘Now listen to me. I don’t know whether I should be incredibly grateful, or incredibly angry—’

  ‘But this is what Joshua asked for on your behalf,’ a cultured voice replied at last. ‘Or so I inferred. I was brought to see you when you were ill – do you remember? In the Home, in Madison West 5. You had already been given the last rites. You were suffering, Agnes.’

  ‘I’m not about to forget that.’

  ‘And Joshua asked me to ease that suffering. Surely you would have wanted that—’

  ‘Joshua. Of course he’d come.’ Of all the children she’d cared for in her years in the Home, Joshua Valienté had always been the most – remarkable. It was typical of him never to have forgotten, not to have stayed away – to have come back when she needed him most, as her life, after too many decades, guttered like a fading candle. Come back to try to put things right. ‘Joshua would ask for help. I suppose you weren’t about to refuse him.’

  ‘No. Especially as he asked me through gritted teeth; we did rather fall out after the Madison incident.’

  ‘But he was surely merely asking you to ease my way. I would never have expected this – blasphemy!’

  Now at last the chair swivelled, and Lobsang faced her, in an orange robe, his head apparently shaved. She’d seen him in person only once before, and she remembered that face – eerie, not quite the human norm, of no clearly identifiable age, like the reconstructed face of a burns victim perhaps. She remembered her own reflection; her new mechanical carcass was better quality than this. Evidently she was a later model.

  He asked, ‘Blasphemy? Must we talk in such terms?’

  ‘Then in what terms do you want to talk?’

  ‘Perhaps about the reason I . . . brought you back.’

  ‘Reason? What reason could there possibly be?’

  ‘Oh, a very good one. I would be very pleased if you would rise to this unusual occasion and consider a proposition – a new purpose, which I believe will accord with your own disposition. Will you hear me out?’

  Sister Agnes took a seat in an almost identical overstuffed chair, opposite him.

  ‘How are you finding your body, by the way?’

  She raised her hand, looked at it, flexed her fingers, and imagined she heard the whirring of tiny hydraulic motors. ‘I’m finding you’ve turned me into Frankenstein’s monster.’

  ‘Actually Frankenstein’s monster was considerably more learned and worthy than his so-called master. Just a thought.’

  ‘Get to the point. What do you want?’

  ‘Very well. Agnes, knowing a great deal about you from Joshua, and from other sources including your own diaries – and knowing your most excellent sympathy for an irrevocably flawed humanity – I have shanghaied you, so to speak, on behalf of said humanity. I have a mission for you. It is this: I need an adversary.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Agnes, you know me. You know what I am. I span the world! Indeed, the worlds. I wield an enormous amount of power, starting with the ability to fix parking tickets and working on up to a scale that no tyrant in all of history has been able to boast. I have no master. I report to nobody save myself. Even Douglas Black is only a patron, a facilitator. He could not stop me. And that’s what worries me.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Of course. Shouldn’t it? I need an adversary, Agnes. Somebody to tell me when I am out of order. When I’m being inhuman. Or being too human, even. It seems to me, given all that Joshua has said about you, that you are uniquely placed to be that person.’

  ‘You brought me back to life to be your conscience? This is ridiculous! Even if I agreed – how could I stop you from doing anything that you want to do?’

  ‘I will give you the means to shut me down.’

  ‘What? Is that even possible?’

  ‘It’s tricky,’ conceded Lobsang. ‘There are now a number of iterations of myself scattered across the world, the Long Earth, and even various locations around the solar system. You can’t have too much backup . . . But, yes, I can find a way to make it happen. To have me deleted from all those places.’

  ‘Hmm. And in all those places,’ said Sister Agnes, ‘where is your soul?’

  ‘Here, talking to you like this, in these new bodies, surely we can agree that the soul has no boundaries?’

  ‘Do I have a choice in any of this?’

  ‘Of course. You can walk away now and you will be taken anywhere on the planet that you wish. You will never hear from me again. Or – well, you too have an off switch, Agnes. But I know that you are not going to take those options.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you?’

  ‘You see, when I came to visit you with Joshua that day, and I asked you if you had any regrets – do you remember? You whispered, “So much left to do.” Now you have the chance to do more. What do you say? Will you be Boswell to my Johnson, Agnes? Watson to my Holmes? Satan to my Miltonic God?’

  ‘Your nagging wife?’

  He laughed, an eerie, not quite human sound.

  Sister Agnes was uncharacteristically silent for some time. The loudest noise was the not-quite-authentic fire. In this womb of a room, she felt stuffy, enclosed. She longed to be out of here. Out on the open road – ‘What happened to my Harley?’

  ‘Joshua had it stored properly: off the ground, tyres over-inflated, fuel drained from the tank, everything greased up.’

  ‘Will I be able to ride it? I mean, will I be physically capable—’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And will this wretched alchemy of yours allow me to drink beer?’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘Where the hell am I, by the way?’

  ‘In Sweden. At the headquarters of a wholly owned subsidiary of the Black Corporation’s medical division. It’s a nice crisp day outside.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘There are bikes. I thought ahead, you see. Not Harleys, but . . . Would you like to go for a ride?’

  It was tempting. To be young again. Young, and on the road . . .

  ‘In a moment,’ she said firmly. ‘How’s Joshua?’

  27

  SO JOSHUA FOUND himself sitting with Sister Agnes reincarnate, in a shabby coffee shop in Madison West 5.

  It was an odd atmosphere. Two people trying to get a grip on this inexplicable new world: a world where the dead could rise and sit cheerfully sipping a coffee while talking of old times . . . Two people not quite finding the words that needed to be said. As it was, however, for now, the smiles were doing the job.

  Agnes sat upright, a bit primly, sipping her coffee. Maybe her features were just a little too regular, her skin a little too smooth, to be convincingly human.

  But as far as Joshua was concerned, too many of the regulars in this coffee shop, mostly Low Earth construction workers, took a much too irreligious interest in Agnes’s new curves. ‘They ought to have more respect for the wimple.’

  ‘Oh, hush. All men are rudimentary creatures who respond to symbols a lot more basic than a habit and a crucifix.’

  ‘I can’t quite believe this is happening.’

  ‘Neither can I. And it’s hard to even believe I’m here to do the disbelieving, if you know what I mean.’

  When he looked up she was smiling, that flagstone-cracking beam of a smile that had always made her look twenty years younger. Agnes’s smile wasn’t the kind of smile that the regular world would associate with the word ‘nun’. It was a smile that had always contained a touch of mischief, and also a terrible rage, kept in check until it was needed. This was what had enabled her to sustain the Home, and her many other projects, in the face of opposition from the Vatican on down. The smile and the rage.

  She sipped her coffee qui
te convincingly, just as Lobsang’s ambulant units always had; he tried not to think about the internal plumbing that made this possible. Now she lowered her cup and looked on him with pride, it seemed. ‘Ah, me. And here you are, a full-grown man, a father, a mayor—’

  ‘Lobsang did this to you.’

  ‘He did,’ she said warningly, ‘though he used some careless talk from you as an excuse to do it, young man. We’ll have to have a serious chat about that.’

  ‘How? I mean—’

  ‘Either I was downloaded from my poor dying brain via some kind of neural scan into a bucket of gel, or I was brought back by Tibetan monks chanting the Book of the Dead over my already interred corpse for forty-nine days. Lobsang tried both ways, he says.’

  Joshua smiled weakly. ‘That’s Lobsang, all right. “Always have a backup.” I came to your funeral, you know, but he kept the rest from me, I guess. I didn’t know about the reincarnation. Or the monks. They must have driven the Sisters crazy . . . Does anybody else know you’re back? I mean, at the Home—’

  ‘Yes, I got in touch with the Home as soon as I could. I asked for Sister Georgina, she was the least likely to go bananas when she picked up the phone and heard my voice, or so I thought. I got a note from the Archbishop, if you want to know. The Church picks up more secrets than Lobsang himself. But I’m not public knowledge yet. Of course I’ll have to come out, so to speak, some time, if I’m to assume my place in the world again. At least, thanks to Lobsang, I’m not the first, umm, revenant in silicon and gel, even if he is wrapped in a cloak of mystery. Enough people are aware of his origins; at least my basic existence might be accepted.’

  ‘What place in the world?’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Well, Joshua, as you ought to know if you ever paid any attention, before my final illness I was deputy chief executive of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents most of America’s Catholic sisters. I was actually in the middle of a terrific fight with the Vatican itself, its Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. That’s the Inquisition, to you. About a book by a Sister Hilary in Cleveland.’