The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

rather rambling way.
    Agnes, bundled up against the biting chill of a Wisconsin winter, was content to tune out his words, content to sit by and watch – and, otherwise, to think. This was January of 2045, over four years after the eruption of Yellowstone, and the worlds of mankind were stabilizing, if not healing, and Agnes, and others, had time to rest. And such moments as this gave her time to get used to herself. To being herself again, seven years after her own peculiar reincarnation. She hardly even recalled her given name, these days. She had been ‘Sister Agnes’ for as long as she could remember, and right now was certain that she still was Sister Agnes.
    Not that theological doubts often troubled her. Sister Agnes could hardly complain about her new incarnation wrought by Lobsang, to be quick once more in this miraculous artificial body, into which her memories had been downloaded. Of course, to have undergone any kind of reincarnation was somewhat upsetting to a decent Catholic girl, for there was no room for that in the orthodox theology. However, she’d always concentrated on the old maxim that the best course was to do the good that was in front of her, and to put such doubts aside. Maybe God had a new mission for her, in this new form made possible by the advance of technology. Why should He not use such tools? And after all, being alive and apparently healthy was surely much better than being dead.
    Meanwhile, what were you to make of Lobsang? In this temporal world he was something like any sensible vision of God, a God of technology, reproducing himself into more and more complex iterations, a being whose consciousness could fly anywhere and everywhere in the electronic world, who could even split himself so that he could be in multiple places at the same time. A being who was aware , as no simple human ever could be. Agnes liked the word ‘apprehend’. It was a good word that meant, to her, to understand completely. And it seemed to her that Lobsang was trying to apprehend the whole world, the whole universe, and trying to understand the role of the human race in that universe.
    Despite all that, Lobsang appeared to be sane, ferociously so in fact – a sanity that burned! As for his character, Lobsang had done some very good work – especially given, of course, that he had the capacity to do a large amount of harm, should he choose. And as far as she could see, whatever a theologian might say, he had a soul, or at least a near perfect facsimile. If he was like a god, then he was a benign god.
    But Agnes had to admit that Lobsang shared something at least with Jehovah: they were both male and proud. Lobsang loved an audience. He was clever, no doubt about it, extremely clever, but he wanted the cleverness to be seen . So he sought sidekicks, people like Joshua Valienté, like Agnes; he needed to let his light shine on their wondering faces.
    And yet this new age, after the volcano, was difficult for Lobsang too. Not physically, as it was for the rest of a hungry and displaced mankind, but in some other, more subtle way. Spiritually, perhaps.
    Agnes wasn’t sure of the cause. Perhaps it was because he had been unable to do anything to avert the Yellowstone disaster. Even Lobsang could only see Yellowstone through the eyes of the geologists, and they had been distracted by the odd phenomenon of disturbances at the stepwise copies of Yellowstone across a swathe of Low Earths – none of which had amounted to much, compared with the eventual Datum eruption. That probably didn’t assuage the guilt of one who thought of himself as a kind of shepherd of mankind, however, an agent ‘who does the bits God left out’, as he once said to her.
    Or perhaps it was that the catastrophe that had afflicted Datum Earth, and particularly Datum America, had inevitably knocked a hole in the infrastructure of gel-based stores and optical fibre networks and satellite links that sustained Lobsang himself.
    Or, again,