Myra, bereft and confused, sought out Alexei in his storeroom cabin. He was curled up on his bunk, facing the plastic-coated ice wall.
“So tell me about Athena.”
Without turning, he said, “Well, Athena singled you out. She seems to think you’re worth preserving.”
Myra pursed her lips. “She’s the real leader of this conspiracy of yours, isn’t she? This underground group of Boy Scouts, trying to figure out the Martian Eye.”
He shrugged, his back still turned. “We Spacers are a divided lot. The Martians don’t think of themselves as Spacers at all. Athena is different from all of us, and she’s a lot smarter. She’s someone we can unite around, at least.”
“Let me get it straight,” she said. “Athena is the shield AI.”
“A copy of her. The original AI was destroyed in the final stages of the sunstorm. Before the storm, this copy was squirted to the stars. Somewhere out there, that broadcast copy was picked up, activated, and transmitted back here.”
This was the story she had picked up from the others. “You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?”
“Nobody outside Cyclops knows the details.”
“Cyclops. The big planet-finder telescope station.”
“Right. Of course the echo could have been picked up anywhere in the solar system, but as far as we know it’s only on Cyclops that she’s been activated. She’s stayed locked up in the hardened data store on Cyclops. Her choice. As far as Hanse Critchfield can tell, she managed to download a subagent into your ident tattoo. Nobody knows how. It self-destructed after she gave you that message. I guess she has her electronic eye on you, Myra.”
That was not a comforting thought. “So now my mother has gone through the Eye. What next?”
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“I guess, for whatever comes of your mother’s mission to Mir. And for Athena.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know, Myra. We have time. It’s still more than eighteen months until the Q-bomb is supposed to reach Earth.
“Look, we’ve done what we could. We delivered your mother to the Eye, and pow, that pretty much short-circuited all the weirdness in the solar system. No offense. Now we’ve come to a kind of a lull. So, take it easy. You’ve been through a lot—we both have. The traveling alone was punishment enough. And as for that shit down in the Pit with the Eye—I can’t begin to imagine how that must have felt for you.”
Myra sat awkwardly on the single chair in the room, and pulled at her fingers. “It’s not just a lull. This is a kind of terminus, for me. You needed me to get my mother here, to Mars. Fine, I did that. But now I’ve crashed into a wall.”
He rolled over and faced her. “I’m sorry you feel like that. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re a good person. I’ve seen that. You love your mother, and you support her, even when it hurts you. That’s a pretty good place to be. Anyhow,” he said, “I’m not one to give you counseling. I’m spying on my father. How dys-functional is that?”
He turned back to the wall.
She sat with him a while longer. When he began to snore, she crept out of the room and closed the door.
30: CHILIARCH
Grove and Abdi brought Bisesa to a smaller chamber, an office set out with couches and tables. This temple seemed to be full of offices, Emeline observed; she learned it was a center of administration for various cults and government departments as well as a place of worship.
Grove sat Bisesa down and wrapped her in a blanket. Grove shouted at various parties about tea, until a servant brought Bisesa a bowl of some hot, milky drink, which she sipped gratefully.
Two solid-looking Macedonian guards were posted at the door. They carried the long, brutal-looking pikes they called sarissae. Bisesa’s return had caused a ferment, it seemed, though whether the guards were protecting the people from Bisesa or vice versa Emeline didn’t know.
Emeline sat, and quietly studied Bisesa Dutt.
She looked older than Emeline, but not much more, fifty perhaps. She was just as Josh had described her—even sketched her in some of his journals. Her face was handsome and well proportioned, if not beautiful, her nose strong and her jaw square. Her eyes were clear, her cut-short hair grayed. Though she seemed drained and disoriented, she had a strength about her, Emeline sensed, a dogged enduring strength.
Bisesa, reviving, looked around cautiously. “So,” she said. “Here we are.”
“Here you are,” Grove said. “You’ve been back home, have you? I mean back to England. Your England.”
“Yes, Captain. I was brought back to the time of the Discontinuity, in my future. Precisely, to within a day. Even though I had spent five years on Mir.”
Grove shook his head. “I ought to get used to the way time flows so strangely here. I don’t suppose I ever will.”
“Now I’m back. But when am I?”
Emeline said, “Madam, it’s well known here that you left Mir in the year five of the new calendar established by the Babylonian astronomers. This is year thirty-two…”
“Twenty-seven years, then.” Bisesa looked at her curiously. “You’re an American.”
“I’m from Chicago.”
“Of course. The Soyuz spotted you, clear of the North American ice sheet.”
Emeline said, “I am from the year 1894.” She had got used to repeating this strange detail.
“Nine years after Captain Grove’s time slice—that was 1885.”
“Yes.”
Bisesa turned to Abdikadir, who had said little since Bisesa had been retrieved. “And you are so like your father.”
Wide-eyed, Abdi was nervous, curious, perhaps eager to impress. “I am an astronomer. I work here in the Temple—there is an observatory on the roof—”
She smiled at him. “Your father must be proud.”
“He isn’t here,” Abdi blurted. And he told her how Abdikadir Omar had gone south into Africa, following his own quest; if Mir was populated by a sampling of hominids from all mankind’s long evolutionary history, Abdikadir had wanted to find the very earliest, the first divergence from the other lines of apes. “But he did not return. This was some years ago.”
Bisesa nodded, absorbing that news. “And Casey? What of him?”
Casey Othic, the third crew member of the Little Bird, was no longer here either. He had died of complications from an old injury he had suffered on Discontinuity day itself. “But,” Captain Grove said, “not before he had left quite a legacy behind. A School of Othic. Engineers to whom Casey became a god, literally! You’ll see, Bisesa.”
Bisesa listened to this. “And the three Soyuz crew were all killed, ultimately. So there are no moderns here—I mean, nobody from my own time. That feels strange. What about Josh?”
Captain Grove coughed into his fist, awkward, almost comically British. “Well, he survived your departure, Bisesa.”
“He came with me halfway,” Bisesa said enigmatically. “But they sent him back.”
“With you gone, there was nothing to keep him here in Babylon.” Grove glanced uncomfortably at Emeline. “He went to find his own people.”
“Chicago.”
“Yes. It took a few years before Alexander’s people, with Casey’s help, put together a sailing ship capable of taking on the Atlantic. But Josh was on the first boat.”
“I was his wife,” Emeline said.
“Ah,” Bisesa said. “‘Was’?”
And Emeline told her something of Josh’s life, and how he died, and the legacy he left behind, his sons.
Bisesa listened gravely. “I don’t know if you’d want to hear this,” she said. “Back home, I looked up Josh. I asked Aristotle—I mean, I consulted the archives. And I found Josh’s place in history.”
The “copy” of Josh left behind on Earth had lived on past 1885. That Josh had fallen in love: aged thirty-five he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons—just
as Emeline gave him sons on Mir. But Josh was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, a correspondent covering yet another war, a great world war Emeline had never heard of.
Emeline listened to this reluctantly. It was somehow a diminishing of her Josh to hear this tale of an alternate version of him.
They talked on for a while, of disrupted histories, of the deteriorating climate of Mir, of a new Troy and a global empire. Grove asked Bisesa if she had found Myra, her daughter. Bisesa said she had, and in fact she now had a granddaughter too. But her mood seemed wistful, complicated. It seemed not much of this had made her happy.
Emeline had little to say. She tried to gauge the mood of the people around her as they talked, adjusting to this new strangeness. Abdi and Ben, born after the Discontinuity, were curious, wide-eyed with wonder. But Grove and Emeline herself, and perhaps Bisesa, were fundamentally fearful. The youngsters didn’t understand, as did the older folk who had lived through the Discontinuity, that nothing in the world was permanent, not if time could be torn apart and knitted back together again at a whim. If you lived through such an event you never got over it.
There was a commotion at the door.
Abdikadir, attuned to life at Alexander’s court, got to his feet quickly.
A man walked briskly into the room, accompanied by two lesser-looking attendants. Abdikadir prostrated himself before this man; he threw himself to the floor, arms outstretched, head down.
Wearing a flowing robe of some expensive purple-dyed fabric the newcomer was shorter than anybody else in the room, but he had a manner of command. He was bald save for a frosting of silver hair. He might have been seventy, Emeline thought, but his lined skin glistened, well treated with oils.
Bisesa’s eyes widened. “Secretary Eumenes.”
The man smiled, his expression cold, calculated. “My title is now ‘chiliarch,’ and has been for twenty years or more.” His English was fluent but stilted, and tinged with a British accent.
Bisesa said, “Chiliarch. Which was Hephaistion’s position, once. You have risen higher than any man save the King, Eumenes of Cardia.”
“Not bad for a foreigner.”
“I suppose I should have expected you,” Bisesa said. “You of all people.”
“As I have always expected you.”
From his prone position on the floor, Abdikadir stammered, “Lord Chiliarch. I summoned you, I sent runners the moment it happened—the Eye—the return of Bisesa Dutt—it was just as you ordered—if there were delays I apologize, and—”
“Oh, be quiet, boy. And stand up. I came when I was ready. Believe it or not there are matters in this worldwide empire of ours even more pressing than enigmatic spheres and mysterious revenants. Now. Why are you here, Bisesa Dutt?”
It was a direct question none of the others had asked her. Bisesa said, “Because of a new Firstborn threat.”
In a few words she sketched a storm on the sun, and how mankind in a future century had labored to survive it. And she spoke of a new weapon, called the “Q-bomb,” which was gliding through space toward Earth—Bisesa’s Earth.
“I myself traveled between planets, in search of answers to this challenge. And then I was brought—here.”
“Why? Who by?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the same agency who took me home in the first place. The Firstborn, or not the Firstborn. Perhaps some agency who defies them.”
“The King knows of your return.”
Grove asked, “How do you know that?”
Eumenes smiled. “Alexander knows everything I know—and generally before me. At least, that is the safest assumption to make. I will speak to you later, Bisesa Dutt, in the palace. The King may attend.”
“It’s a date.”
Eumenes grimaced. “I had forgotten your irreverence. It is interesting to have you back, Bisesa Dutt.” He turned on his heel and walked out, to more bowing and scraping from Abdikadir.
Bisesa glanced at Emeline and Grove. “So you know why I’m here. A bomb in the solar system, an Eye on Mars. Why are you here?”
“Because,” Abdikadir said, “I summoned them when your telephone rang.”
Bisesa stared at him. “My phone?”
They hurried back to the Eye chamber.
Abdikadir extracted the phone from its shrine, and handed it to Bisesa reverently.
It lay in her palm, scuffed, familiar. She couldn’t believe it; her eyes misted over. She tried to explain to Abdikadir. “It’s just a phone. I was given it when I was twelve years old. Every child on Earth got a phone at that age. A communications and education program by the old United Nations. Well, it came here with me through the Discontinuity, and it was a great help—a true companion. But then its power failed.”
Abdikadir listened to this rambling, his face expressionless. “It rang. Chirp, chirp.”
“It will respond to an incoming call, but that’s all. When the power went I had no way of recharging it. Still haven’t, in fact. Wait—”
She turned to her spacesuit, which still lay splayed open on the floor. Nobody had dared touch it. “Suit Five?”
Its voice, from the helmet speakers, was very small. “I have always strived to serve your needs during your extravehicular activity.”
“Can you give me one of your power packs?”
It seemed to think that over. Then a compartment on the suit’s belt flipped open to reveal a compact slab of plastic, bright green like the rest of the suit. Bisesa pulled this out of its socket.
“Is there anything else I can do for you today, Bisesa?”
“No. Thank you.”
“I will need refurbishment before I can serve you again.”
“I’ll see you get it.” She feared that was a lie. “Rest now.”
The suit fell silent with a kind of sigh.
She took the battery pack, flipped open the phone’s interface panel, and jammed the phone onto the cell’s docking port. Male and female connectors joined smoothly. “What was it Alexei said? Thank Sol for universal docking protocols.”
The phone lit up and spoke hesitantly. “Bisesa?”
“It’s me.”
“You took your time.”
31: OPERATION ORDER
A new draft operation order was transmitted to Liberator from Bella’s office in Washington.
“We’re to shadow the Q-bomb,” Edna said, scanning the order.
“How far?” John Metternes asked.
“All the way to Earth, if we have to.”
“Christ on a bike, that might be twenty months!”
“Libby, can we do it?”
The AI said, “We will be coasting, like the bomb. So propellant and reaction mass won’t be a problem. If the recycling efficiency stays nominal the life shell will be able to sustain crew functions.”
“Nicely put,” John said sourly.
“You’re the engineer,” Edna snapped. “Do you think she’s right?”
“I guess. But what’s the point, Captain? Our weapons are useless.”
“Best to have somebody on point than nobody. Something might turn up. John, Libby, start drawing up a schedule. I’ll go through the draft order, and if we’re sure it’s feasible from a resources point of view we’ll send our revision back to Earth.”
“Bonza trip this is going to be,” Metternes muttered.
Edna glanced at her softscreen. There was the bomb, silent, gliding ever deeper into the solar system, visible only by the stars it reflected. Edna tried to work out what she was going to say to Thea—how to explain she wasn’t coming home any time soon.
32: ALEXANDER
Bisesa was given a room of her own in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, which Alexander had, inevitably, taken over. Eumenes’s staff provided clothes in the elaborate Persian style that had been adopted by the Macedonian court.
And Emeline called in and gave her some toiletries: a comb, creams for her face and hands, a tiny bottle of perfume, even some archaic-looking s
anitary towels. They were a selection from the travel kit of a nineteenth-century lady. “You looked as if you didn’t arrive with much,” she said.
The gesture, of one woman far from home to another, made Bisesa feel like crying.
She slept a while. She was weighed down by the sudden return to Earth gravity, three times that of Mars. And her body clock was all over the place; as before, this new Discontinuity, her own personal time slip, left her with a kind of jet lag.
And then she did cry, for herself, the shock of it all, and for the loss of Myra. But these last few extraordinary weeks in which they had been traveling together across space had probably been as long as she had spent alone with Myra since the days of the sunstorm. That was some consolation, she told herself, even though it seemed they had hardly spoken, hardly got to know each other.
She longed to know more about Charlie. She hadn’t even seen a photo of her granddaughter.
She tried to sleep again.
She was woken by a diffident serving girl, maybe a slave. It was early evening. Time for her reception with Eumenes, and perhaps Alexander.
She bathed and dressed; she had worn Babylonian robes before, but she still felt ridiculous dressed up like this.
The grand chamber to which she was led was a pocket of obscene wealth, plastered with tapestries and fine carpets and exquisite furniture. Even the pewter mug a servant gave her for her wine was studded with precious stones. But there were guards everywhere, at the doorways, moving through the hall, armed with long sarissa pikes and short stabbing-swords. They wore no solid armor, but had helmets of what looked like ox-hide, corselets of linen, leather boots. They looked like the infantry soldiers Bisesa remembered from her earlier time here.
Amid the soldiers’ iron and the silver and gilt of the decorations, courtiers walked, chatting, dismissive. They wore exotic clothes, predominantly purple and white. Their faces were painted so heavily, men and women, it was hard to tell how old they were. They noticed Bisesa and they were curious, but they were far more interested in each other and their own web of rivalries.