Now it was too late, for Lobsang was dead.

Joshua had been there when it had happened, in the late fall of 2045:

He and Sally Linsay had waited by the door of the Home in Madison West 5. It was early evening, and streetlights sparked.

Sally was in her travelling gear, her multi-pocketed fisherman’s jacket under a waterproof coverall, a light leather pack on her back. As usual, she looked like she was going to light out of here at any moment. And the longer the Sisters took to answer the damn door, the more likely that became.

‘Look,’ Joshua said, trying to forestall her, ‘just take it easy. Say hello. Everybody here wants to see you, to say thank you for what you did for the Next. Busting those super-smart kids out of the Pearl Harbor facility—’

‘You know me, Joshua. These Low Earths are mob scenes nowadays. And places like this. This Home, where they lock you up for your own good. I don’t care how happy or otherwise you were here, Joshua, with those penguins.’

‘Don’t call them penguins.’

‘As soon as we’re done I’m going to get blind drunk, as fast as possible—’

‘Then you’ll need something stronger than our sweet sherry.’ Sister John had quietly opened the door; now she smiled. ‘Come on in.’

Sally shook the Sister’s hand with good enough grace.

Joshua followed them in, walking down a corridor into what was to him an eerie re-creation of the Home he’d grown up in, the original long ago wrecked by the Datum Madison nuke.

Sister John, her head enclosed in a crisp wimple, leaned closer to Joshua. ‘So how are you?’

‘Fine. Disoriented to be here.’

‘I know. Doesn’t quite smell right, does it? Well, give the mice a few decades to do their work and they’ll put that right.’

‘And you. You’re running the place now! To me you’ll always be plain old Sarah.’

‘Who you had to rescue from the forest on Step Day. When you come back here it feels like we suddenly got all grown up, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah. To me the superior ought to be a towering figure, and old—’

‘As old as me?’ Sister Agnes was waiting for them in the doorway of the Home’s parlour, the posh lounge where the Sisters had always received visitors.

But Agnes, eerily, now looked younger than Sister John. And when Joshua submitted to a hug there was just the faintest hint of artifice, an excessive smoothness in the cheek he kissed – and beneath her practical, slightly shabby habit an alarming, almost subliminal sense of super-strength. After her death, Lobsang had brought Agnes back to life, downloading her memories into a lifelike android shell while simultaneously chanting Buddhist prayers. To Joshua it was as if somebody had turned his life’s chief mother-figure into a terminator robot. But he had known Lobsang a long time, and he’d learned to see the spirit inside the machine. As with Lobsang, so now with Agnes.

He said simply: ‘Hello, Agnes.’

‘And Sally Linsay.’ With Sally it was a wary handshake rather than a hug. ‘I’ve heard so much about you, Ms Linsay.’

‘Ditto.’

Agnes studied her intently, almost challengingly, before turning away. ‘So, Joshua, how are your family? Such a shame you’re apart from your little boy.’

Joshua said, ‘Not so little … Well, you know me. I’ve a split soul, Agnes. Half of me always drawn away, out into the Long Earth.’

‘Still, you’re home now. Come and join the party …’

Sitting side by side on the usual overstuffed armchairs – some of them originals, retrieved from the old Datum Home – were Nelson Azikiwe and Lobsang.

Lobsang, or at least this ambulant avatar, with shaven head and bare feet, was dressed in what had become his trademark garb of orange robe. Sally was briskly introduced to Nelson. South African born, a former clergyman now in his fifties, he was dressed comparatively soberly, in a suit and tie. This ill-matched pair were balancing china teacups on their knees, and plates bearing slices of cake. A younger Sister whom Joshua didn’t recognize was fussing around, serving.

And Shi-mi the cat was here. She came to Joshua, favouring him with a brush against his legs, and she glared at Sally with LED-green eyes.

As Joshua and Sally sat down, Agnes joined the circle, and Sister John and her young companion served up more tea and cake. Agnes said, ‘Well, this was my idea, Joshua. In this moment of comparative calm – now that the latest global panic, when we all thought we were going to be driven to extinction by super-brain children, has somewhat subsided – my plan was to bring Lobsang here, and to gather his friends together for once.’

Sally scowled. ‘“Friends”? Is that how you think of us, Lobsang? We’re gaming tokens to you, more like. Dimes to feed the slot machine of fate.’

Nelson grinned. ‘Quite so, Ms Linsay. But here we all are, even so.’

‘Friends,’ Agnes said firmly. ‘What else is there in this life but friends and family?’

Lobsang, calm, rather blank-faced, said, ‘Your own family is making waves just now, Sally. Your father at least, with his ideas of a new kind of space development.’

‘Ah, yes, dear old Papa, dreaming of using his Martian beanstalks to open up access to space. A straight-line path to massive industrialization.’

‘Willis Linsay is wise, in his way. We should build up again, from this low base we’ve been reduced to by Yellowstone. As fast and as cleanly as we can, and space elevators will make that possible. After all we may some day need to compete with the Next.’

Nelson asked, ‘What do you know about the Next, Lobsang? I know they made some kind of contact with you. Is there any more than you’ve said publicly?’

‘Only that they’ve gone. All those brilliant children, emerging all over the Datum, all over the Long Earth – the next step in human evolution – that our government rounded up and put in a pen on Hawaii. Gone to a place they call the Grange, out in the Long Earth somewhere. I couldn’t even speculate where.’

Sally laughed. ‘They didn’t tell you? They just left you to clear up their mess at Happy Landings, didn’t they? This is twisting you up, isn’t it, Lobsang? The omnipresent, omniscient god of the Long Earth, reduced to a messenger boy, by children.’

Joshua made to hush her.

But Lobsang said, ‘No, let her speak. She’s right. This has been a difficult time for me. You know that as well as anybody, Joshua. And in fact that’s the reason I allowed Agnes to call you all together.’

Agnes stiffened. ‘Oh, you allowed it, did you? And there was me thinking this was all my idea.’

Lobsang looked at them in turn, at Sally, Nelson, Joshua, Agnes, Sister John. ‘You are my family. That’s how I think of you all. Yet you have family ties of your own. You mustn’t neglect them.’ He turned to Nelson. ‘You, too, are not as alone as you thought you were, my friend.’

Nelson looked intrigued rather than offended at this opacity. ‘Textbook enigmatic. Typical Lobsang!’

‘I don’t mean to be obscure. If you just think back to when we went to New Zealand—’

Evidently frustrated at this hijacking of her party, Agnes interrupted sharply. ‘Lobsang, if you’ve something to say you’d better get to the point.’

Lobsang sat forward, shoulders hunched. Suddenly he looked, to Joshua, unaccountably old. Old and tired. ‘Yellowstone, and the collapse of the Datum, were hard for me. I suffuse the Long Earth, I have iterations scattered across the solar system, but my centre of gravity was always Datum Earth. Now the Datum itself is grievously wounded. And so, as a consequence, am I.’ He pressed his thumbs into his temples. ‘Sometimes I feel incomplete. As if I am losing memories, and then losing the memory of the loss itself … Yellowstone to me was like a lobotomy.

‘Since then I have had – doubts. I told you of this, Joshua. I have had the odd sensation that I remembered my previous incarnations. But that is not the accepted norm, under the Tibetan tradition; if my reincarnation has been fully successful I should shed all memory of my previous lives. Perhaps this reincarnation is imperfect, then. Or,’ he glanced at Agnes, ‘perhaps there is some more mundane explanation. I am after all nothing but a creature of electrical sparks in distributed stores of Black Corporation gel. Perhaps I have been hacked.