‘I’ll consider it,’ he said.

Burdon slapped his own forehead. ‘Ah, man! Don’t consider, do.’

But Luis would not be swayed, not on the spur of the moment.

They returned to the tent, where Hackett, reading from a bit of paper, repeated in sonorous tones a speech of Albert’s on slavery: ‘“I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertion of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings, at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe, has not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion …”’

On old Abel this seemed to have the effect of an incantation. He grasped Simon’s wrist with one arthritic hand. ‘Simon, you listen to dem wuds. “De des’la-shun of Afric’ … de blackes’ stain.” Don’ you forget dem wuds, don’t evvuh.’

21

THERE WAS SOMETHING wrong with the world.

Three years after her arrival here with Lobsang, Ben and Shi-mi, that was Agnes’s definitive view of Earth West 1,217,756.

Oh, the people were fine. And it was the people who mattered in the end; Agnes had always known that, and the rest was just a backdrop.

But the world was weird.

Take the old Poulson place. In the beginning it had been Nikos Irwin, with his dog, who had spent his waking hours in that dilapidated swap house on the far side of Manning Hill. Nikos and his buddies seemed to be growing up now and losing interest, but their place was being taken by a new generation, including Ben and Nikos’s little sister Lydia. Agnes had heard the lurid ghost stories, and dismissed them, but she could sense something odd every time she went down there, usually in search of Ben. Strange scents, elusive in the forest air. Once, a peculiar greenish light that had come emanating from the back of the house – only a glimpse, there and gone again. In Agnes’s last incarnation, her own fatal illness had begun with a hard lump on her skin that didn’t belong. The Poulson house was the same, she thought. It was a flaw, something wrong, something unwelcome, that didn’t belong in this world. She hadn’t yet decided to ban Ben from the place – she dreaded the battle that would follow if she tried – but she was moving towards it.

Above all, Agnes discovered, she hated not to be able to tell the time, house rules or not. Since she’d arrived she’d never felt as if she was sleeping properly here. The dawn always came too early, no matter what time of year it was. Sometimes she sensed that others had the same feeling, Marina Irwin for instance when she came round for morning coffee: a certain tiredness, a vagueness, muddled thinking. But without a decent watch Agnes couldn’t tell if her sleep patterns actually were drifting, or by how much.

Even the animals seemed distressed. The furballs would emerge from their burrows and their holes in the trees at the wrong time. Sometimes the big birds would charge around the forest almost randomly, screeching like eagles.

She had considered asking Lobsang for access to her internal timers, or the clocks in the gondola. She kept putting it off; she felt as if that would be the beginning of the end, the fracturing of the dream.

Lobsang meanwhile wouldn’t comment on any of this. Instead ‘George’ just kept his head down. He worked on his farm despite the vagaries of the weather, strengthened the stockade around their plot, fixed the roof of the house they were extending one room at a time, pulled weeds from his flower beds and cultivated his kitchen garden, and tended his animals and crops. He was sociable enough. He joined in the hunts. And, comically, he was trying to learn the fiddle so he could play at barn dances, filling the evening air on Manning Hill with a sound like an arthritic warthog.

Agnes supposed that in a way his behaviour represented a victory for her. He had revived her in the first place in order to provide a balance to his own tendencies towards omniscience and omnipotence. But now, and maybe it was typical of Lobsang and his obsessiveness to go to extremes, he’d abandoned his old self entirely and had devoted himself completely to this new life as ‘George’, rooted in the soil of a remote Earth.

And he resolutely refused to think about anomalies in the world. Even the occasional flashes they saw on the face of the moon didn’t distract him from his concentration on pioneering mundanity.

Well, that wasn’t enough for Agnes, not any more. She decided to do something about it.

Shi-mi came to see her as she struggled with her gadgetry in the yard, in the lee of the house, away from the prevailing wind on this bright spring day. She’d taken a plastic funnel from her kitchen store, hung it from a bracket, filled it with fine sand from the bank of the creek, and allowed the sand to run out into a bucket. Now she was sitting on the ground and measuring her own pulse as the sand ran down.

If this world wouldn’t allow clocks to work, she’d decided, she would damn well build her own. Never mind electronics, or even clockwork which was almost as much of a mystery to her. She’d gone back to basics.

The cat walked up somewhat stiffly, lay down beside her and inspected the rig. ‘If I may ask, Agnes – what on Earth are you doing?’

‘Can’t you tell? I’m making an hourglass. And I’m missing Joshua. He’d put together something for me in a couple of hours, in a polished wooden case, probably …’

The cat licked her paws. ‘There are a number of ways to tell the time. By a simple sundial for instance. Though that would take some weeks, at least, to calibrate.’

‘I intend to do that too. But I want some other way, independent of the sun. I want to measure the length of the day. Shi-mi, I know this sounds dumb.’

‘I travelled months on twains run by US Navy grunts. Believe me, nothing you say about mechanical matters will sound dumb to me. And I do know why you need to do this. We spoke of it before—’

‘I think there’s something wrong with time here,’ Agnes blurted. ‘The days are too short – or maybe too long. I don’t know. All I do know is I’m having trouble sleeping, and always have had. And as all our watches and clocks are either back home in Madison West 5 or out of bounds—’

‘My internal clocks are not accessible to me either.’

‘—and I don’t want to ask Lobsang because I think it would upset him if I started breaking the rules around here, I need to make some other kind of measurement. I figure that if I can measure an hour accurately, say, then I’ll stay awake for a day and a night, from dawn to dawn, and just count the hours, count how often I have to empty the bucket. It’s crude but better than nothing.’

‘Noon to noon would be better. Easier to mark accurately. A sundial would help you with that. And it may be more precise to have smaller buckets, measuring half- or quarter-hours … Or you could use both, to cross-check the measurements. But how can you be sure your hourglass measures a true hour in the first place?’

‘That’s my problem, all right.’ She showed the cat her wrist, her thumb pressed on a vein. ‘My resting pulse has always been pretty steady, fifty beats a minute.’

‘A strong heart.’

‘Yes. I assume Lobsang will have replicated that when he, umm, remade me.’

‘That is a very uncertain baseline.’

Agnes found it hard not to be sarcastic to a talking cat. ‘I suppose you have a better way?’

‘Yes. Build a pendulum.’

‘A what?’

‘A simple pendulum. A thread suspended from a beam, supporting a weight. The length of the thread determines the period of the swing. A length of thirty-nine inches will give you a period of two seconds, almost exactly. That’s if the pull of gravity here is the same as on the Datum, and when we arrived we measured that, among other parameters … A longer length would give you a longer period, more accuracy. You could use a reliable reference like that to build from. Make sand cups to measure a minute, combine them to get five minutes, thirty—’