The Long War

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 chic, 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?”