The Long War

The door at the far end of the corridor opened and a woman stepped out. “Mr. Valienté? So glad you could make it.” She was small and dark, Asiatic, and wore the largest spectacles Joshua had ever seen. She held out her hand. “My name is Hiroe. Welcome to transEarth. You need to wear this badge.” She handed him a badge on a lanyard, with the transEarth name and chessboard-knight logo, and his name, mugshot, and a scrambled code that could represent anything from his shoe-size to his DNA sequence. “Wear that at all times, or our security killer-robots will zap you with their laser-beam eyes. Just kidding!”

“Really.”

“Oh, sure. You may be interested to know that you’ve already cost Selena Jones a dollar. You remember Selena?”

“I remember Selena. Is she still Lobsang’s legal guardian?”

“Under some jurisdictions, yes. She wagered me you wouldn’t come, that you wouldn’t respond to Lobsang’s call for help.”

“Did she now?”

“But curiosity is a wonderful thing, is it not?”

That and a fool’s residual loyalty, he thought.

“This way, please.”

Hiroe led Joshua now into a big, low-ceilinged room, with picture windows looking out over a stretch of prairie. There were monitor screens all around the place, and a worn keypad on the desk, which was a slab of oak six inches thick. It was the kind of office that might belong to someone who enjoyed their work, and didn’t do much else but work.

More interesting was the stone trough in front of one window. The plants in it were trumpets fully five feet high, a pale green with red and white ribbing. They clustered together as though they shared a secret, and gave Joshua an uneasy feeling that it wasn’t just the air currents that were making them move.

“Sarracinea gigantica,” said Hiroe. “They’re carnivorous, you know.”

“They look it. When’s feeding time?”

She laughed prettily. “They’re only interested in insects. They secrete a nectar, a drugged bait, that’s got interesting commercial possibilities. We got the original seeds from one of the stepwise alternates, of course.”

“Which one?”

“You couldn’t even begin to afford to buy the answer to that question,” she said pleasantly, motioning him to a chair. “Just a moment, please, while I process you through the final stages of security…” She tapped at the keypad. “That’s our trade, you know, here at transEarth. We buy and sell commercially useful information.”

So this wasn’t just a Black-funded playpen for Lobsang, then, Joshua thought cynically. He supposed it would be characteristic of Douglas Black to demand a profit.

“There: you’re in the system. Please do wear your badge at all times. So are you ready to meet Lobsang?”

Hiroe took him out of the building, and they walked in the grounds. The evening was gathering now, on this world as on all the others. A few streetlights sparked on the local horizon, and the sun hung low in the sky.

But there was a faintly sulphurous smell in the air. The news today was that this world’s copy of Yellowstone was a little more restless than most of its brothers. Reports of trees being poisoned by acid seeps, for instance. Evidently there was ongoing geological unrest at the Yellowstone footprint across most of the Low Earths. On the Datum itself there had been an explosion that had killed a hapless young park ranger called Herb Lewis: not a volcanic eruption, the scientists emphasized, a hydrothermal event, an explosion of trapped, superheated water. All minor events. Minor: even from here, a thousand miles away from Yellowstone, Joshua thought he could smell this particular world’s minor event, and, remembering the apocalyptic nutjob who had accosted them at the Datum twain station about fire and brimstone at Yellowstone, he felt a prickle of unease.

Hiroe sat down on a slab bench carved out of one great baulk of timber. “Please. We will wait here for Lobsang.”

Joshua sat stiffly.

“You are nervous about meeting him again, aren’t you?”

“Not nervous, exactly… How can you tell?”

“Oh, the little things. The gritted teeth. The white knuckles. Subtleties like that.”

Joshua laughed. But he glanced around before replying. “Can he hear us out here?”

She shook her head. “Actually no. In this place he has limits on his capabilities. Sister Agnes says that’s good for him. Not to be omnipotent, in at least one place in the world. Or, the worlds. Why do you think I brought you out here before speaking this way? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

“You’re more than an employee, right?”

“I do think of myself as a friend. He is everywhere, and yet he is very alone, Mr. Valienté. He does need friends. Especially you, sir…”

An old man approached through the afternoon light—that was Joshua’s first impression. He was slender, tall, with a shaven head, and he wore a loose orange robe. His sandalled feet were dirty, and he carried a kind of rake.

Joshua stood up. “Hello, Lobsang.”

Hiroe smiled, bowed, and gracefully slipped away.

“First things first,” Lobsang said. “Thank you for coming.”