Bisesa’s radio bleeped. She pulled her headset out of her pocket and wrapped it around her head. It was a shortwave message from Casey. One of Grove’s scouting expeditions had spotted what appeared to be an army, a massive one, in the valley of the Indus. And Casey had received a signal on his lashed-up receiving station, he said. A signal from space. Her heart beat faster.
Time to go, then.
Before she turned away Bisesa ran her field of view along that crumbling base of ice, one last time. No wonder the weather was screwed up, she thought. This big chunk of ice wasn’t meant to be here. The cold winds pouring off it would mess up the climate for kilometers around, and when it melted there would be swollen rivers, floods. That was, of course, if things remained stable, and there wasn’t more unraveling of time to come . . .
She glimpsed movement. She scanned back, upping the magnification. Two, three, four figures walked through the chill blue shadow of the glaciers. They were upright, and wore something dark and heavy, skins perhaps. They carried sticks, or spears. But they were squat, broad, their shoulders massive and rounded, their muscles immense. They were like pumped-up American footballers, she thought; Casey, eat your heart out. Tiny sparks of light, well-spaced, hovered over them: a string of Eyes.
One of the figures stopped and turned in her direction. Had he glimpsed a reflection off her goggles? She tapped the controls, and the magnification zoomed to its limit. The image grew blurred and shaky, but she could make out a face. It was broad, almost chinless, with powerful cheekbones, a forehead that sloped back from a thick brow into a mass of black hair, and a great protruding nose from which steam snorted, white and regular, as if from some hidden engine. Not human—not quite—but still, something atavistic in her felt a shock of recognition. Then the image broke down into a blur of color, white and blue.
13: LIGHTS IN THE SKY
Things didn’t get any easier. It was a rare day now when the sky didn’t bubble with cloud. Jamrud began to be plagued by rainstorms, and sometimes hail, that would boil up out of nowhere. The sepoys said they had never known such weather.
The British officers, though, had more on their minds than the weather. They were increasingly distracted by the sketchy reports their scouts brought back of an army of some kind to the southwest, and they were scrambling for ways to bring back more complete information.
But for all their difficulties the castaways of Jamrud were learning a great deal more about their new world, for as the crew of the Soyuz followed their lonely cycles around the planet, they downloaded images and other data to Casey’s improvised receiving station. Casey used what was left of the Little Bird’s avionics to store, process and display the data.
The Soyuz’s storm-streaked images of a transformed world were bewildering, but they captivated all who studied them, in different ways. Bisesa thought that for Casey and Abdikadir, even though the images in themselves were disturbing, they were a reassuring reminder of home, where they had been used to having the ability to call up images like this whenever they chose. But soon the Soyuz must fall to earth, and their sole eye in the sky would close.
As for the men of 1885, Ruddy, Josh, Captain Grove and the rest were at first simply gosh-wowed by the display softscreens and other gadgets: while Casey and Abdi were comforted by familiarity, Ruddy and the others were distracted by novelty. Then, once they got used to the technology, the British were struck by the marvel of looking at images of a world from space. Even though the Soyuz was only a few hundred kilometers up, a glimpse of a curved horizon, of cloud banks sailing on layers of air, or of familiar, recognizable features, like India’s teardrop shape or Britain’s fractal coastlines, would send them into paroxysms of wonder.
“I had never imagined such a godlike perspective was possible,” Ruddy said. “Oh, you know how big the world is, in round, fat numbers.” He thumped his belly. “But I had never felt it, not in here. How small and scattered are the works of man—how petty his pretensions and passions—how like ants we are!”
But the nineteenth-century crowd soon got past that and learned to interpret what they were seeing; even the stiffer military types like Grove surprised Bisesa with their flexibility. It took only a couple of days after the first download before the chattering, awestruck crowds around Casey’s softscreen began to grow more somber. For, no matter how marvelous the images and the technology that had produced them, the world they revealed was sobering indeed.
Bisesa took copies of all this to store in their only significant portable electronic device, her phone. The data was precious, she saw. For a long time these images would be all they would have to tell them what was on the other side of the horizon. And besides, she agreed with cosmonaut Kolya that there should be a record of where they had come from. Otherwise people would eventually forget, and believe that this was all there ever had been.
But the phone had its own agenda. “Show me the stars,” it said, in its small whisper.
So, each evening, she would set it up on a convenient rock, where it sat like a patient metallic insect, its small camera peering into the sky. Bisesa put up little screens of waterproofed canvas to protect it. These observation sessions could last hours as the phone waited for a glimpse of some key part of the sky through the scudding clouds.
One evening, as Bisesa sat with her phone, Abdikadir, Josh and Ruddy walked out of the fort to join her. Abdikadir brought a tray of drinks, fresh lemonade and sugar water.
Ruddy grasped the nature of the phone’s project readily enough. By mapping the sky, and comparing the stars’ positions to the astronomical maps stored in its database, the phone could determine the date. “Just like astronomers at the Babylonian court,” he said.
Josh sat close to Bisesa, and his eyes were huge in the gathering dark of the evening. He could not be called handsome. He had a small face, with protruding ears, and cheeks pushed up by smiling; his chin was weak, but his lips were full, and oddly sensual. He was an endearing package, she admitted to herself—and, though she felt obscurely guilty about it, as if she was somehow betraying Myra, his obvious affection for her was coming to matter to her.
He said, “Do you think that even the stars have been washed around the sky?”
“I don’t know, Josh,” she said. “Perhaps that’s my sky up there; perhaps it’s yours; perhaps it’s nobody’s. I want to find out.”
Ruddy said, “Surely by the twenty-first century you have a much deeper understanding of the nature of the cosmos, even of time and space themselves, than we poor souls.”
“Yes,” said Josh eagerly. “We may not know why all this has happened to us—but surely, Bisesa, armed with your advanced science, you can speculate on how the world has been turned upside down . . .”
Abdikadir put in, “Maybe. But it’s going to be a little difficult to talk about spacetime, as you wouldn’t have even heard of special relativity for another couple of decades.”
Ruddy looked blank. “Of special what?”
The phone whispered dryly, “Start with chasing a light beam. If it was good enough for Einstein—”
“All right,” Bisesa said. “Josh, think about this. When I look at you, I don’t see you as you are now. I see you as you were a little way in the past, a few fractions of a second ago, the time it took starlight reflecting from your face to reach my eye.”
Josh nodded. “So far so clear.”
Bisesa said, “Suppose I chased the light from your face, going faster and faster. What would I see?”
Josh frowned. “It would be like two fast trains, one overtaking the other—both fast, but from the point of view of the one, the other seems to move slowly.” He smiled. “You would see my cheeks and mouth moving like a glacier when I smiled to greet you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Good, you’ve got the idea. Now, Einstein—ah, he was a physicist of the early twentieth century, an important one—Einstein taught us this isn’t just an optical effect. It’s not just that I see your face move more slowly, Josh. Light
is the most fundamental way we have of measuring time—and so, the faster I travel, the slower I see time pass for you.”
Ruddy pulled at his mustache. “Why?”
Abdikadir laughed. “Five generations of schoolteachers since Einstein have failed to come up with a good answer to that, Ruddy. It’s just the way the universe is built.”
Josh grinned. “How wonderful—that light should be forever young, forever ageless—perhaps it’s true that God’s angels are creatures of light itself!”
Ruddy shook his head. “Angels or no angels, this is damned fishy. And what does it have to do with our present situation?”
“Because,” Bisesa said, “in a universe where time itself adjusts around you depending on how fast you travel, the concept of simultaneity is a little tricky. What is simultaneous for Josh and Ruddy, say, may not be simultaneous for me. It depends on how we move, how the light passes between us.”
Josh nodded, but he was evidently uncertain. “And this isn’t simply an effect of timing—”
“Not timing, but physics,” Bisesa said.
“I think I see,” Josh said. “And if that can happen, it may be possible to take two events that were not simultaneous—let’s say, a moment in my life in 1885, and a moment in Bisesa’s in 2037—and bring them together so that they touch, so closely we can even . . .”
“Kiss?” said Ruddy, mock-solemnly.
Poor Josh actually blushed.
Ruddy said, “But all this is described from the point of view of one person or another. From what mighty point of view, then, is our new world to be seen? That of God—or of the Eye of Time itself?”
“I don’t know,” Bisesa said.
“We need to learn more,” Josh said decisively. “If we’re ever to have a chance of fixing things—”
“Oh, yes.” Ruddy laughed hollowly. “There is that. Fixing things!”
Abdikadir said, “In our age we’ve grown used to our seas and rivers and air being fouled. Now time is no longer a steady, remorseless stream, but churned up, full of turbulence and eddies.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it’s just something we will have to get used to.”
“Perhaps the truth is simpler,” Ruddy said brutally. “Perhaps your noisy flapping machines have shattered the cathedral calm of eternity. The whizzes and bangs of the terrible wars of your age have shocked the walls of that cathedral beyond their capacity to heal.”
Josh looked from one to the other. “You’re saying all this might not be natural—it might not even be the actions of some superior beings—it might be our fault?”
“Maybe,” said Bisesa. “But maybe not. We only know a little more science than you, Josh—we really don’t know.”
Ruddy was still brooding on relativity. “Who was this fellow—did you say Einstein? Sounds German to me.”
Abdikadir said, “He was a German Jew. In your time he was, umm, a six-year-old schoolboy in Munich.”
Ruddy was muttering, “Space and time themselves can be warped—there is no certainty, even in physics—how Einstein’s opinions must have helped the world toward flux and disintegration—and now you say he was Hebrew, and a German—it’s so inevitable it makes one laugh!”
The phone said quietly, “Bisesa, there’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“Tau Ceti.”
Josh said, “What is that? Oh. A star.”
“A star like the sun, about twelve light-years away. I saw it nova. It was faint, and by the time I noticed it the light was already fading, already past its peak—it lasted only a few nights—but . . .”
Abdikadir pulled his beard. “What’s so remarkable about that?”
“Just that it’s impossible,” said the phone.
“How so?”
“Only binary systems nova—a companion has to add inert material to the star, which is eventually blown off in an explosion.”
“And Tau Ceti is solitary,” Bisesa said. “So how can it have gone nova?”
“You can check my records,” the phone said tetchily.
Bisesa looked at the sky uncertainly.
Ruddy grumbled, “In the circumstances that seems a rather remote and abstract puzzle to me. Perhaps we should concern ourselves with more immediate matters. Yon phone has been working on its Babylonian date-calculating for days already. How long will it take to deliver its marvelous news?”
“That’s up to the phone. It’s always had a mind of its own.”
He laughed. “Sir Gadget! Tell me what you have surmised—as best you can, incomplete as it may be. I order it!”
The phone said, “Bisesa—”
She had set up nanny safeguards to ensure the phone didn’t say too much to the British. But now she shrugged. “It’s okay, phone.”
“The thirteenth century,” the phone whispered.
Ruddy leaned closer. “When?”
“It’s hard to be more exact. The changes in the stars’ positions are slight—my cameras are designed for daylight, and I have to take long-exposure images—the clouds are a pain in the ass . . . There are a number of lunar eclipses in the period; if I observe one of those I may be able to pin it down to the exact day.”
“The thirteenth century, though,” Ruddy breathed, and he peered up at a cloud-littered sky. “Six centuries from home!”
“For us, eight,” Bisesa said grimly. “But what does that mean? It might be a thirteenth-century sky, but for sure the world we are standing on isn’t thirteenth-century Earth. Jamrud doesn’t belong there, for instance.”
Josh said, “Perhaps the thirteenth century is a—a foundation. Like the underlying fabric onto which the other fragments of time, making up this great chronological counterpane of a world, have been stitched.”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” the phone said.
Bisesa shrugged. “I think it’s more complex than bad.”
Ruddy lay back against the rock, hands clasped behind his broad head, the clouds reflected in his thick glasses. “The thirteenth century,” he said wistfully. “What a marvelous journey this is turning out to be. I thought I was coming to the North–West Frontier, and that was adventure enough, but to be whisked to the Middle Ages! . . . But I admit it isn’t wonder I feel at the moment. Nor even fear, over the fact that we are lost.”
Josh sipped his lemonade. “What, then?”
Ruddy said, “When I was five years old I was sent to stay with foster parents in Southsea. It’s a common practice, of course, for if you’re an émigré parent you want your children to be grounded in Blighty. But at five I knew nothing of that. I hated that place as soon as I set foot in it—Lorne Lodge, the House of Desolation!—I was punished regularly, in truth, for the dreadful crime simply of being me. My sister and I would comfort ourselves by playing at Robinson Crusoe, never dreaming I would one day become a Robinson Crusoe in time! I wonder where poor Trix is now . . . But what hurt most about my situation, I see now, was that I had been abandoned—as I saw it then—betrayed by my parents, and left in that desolate place of misery and pain.”
“And so it is here,” Josh mused.
“Once I was abandoned by my parents,” Ruddy said bitterly. “Now we are abandoned by God Himself.”
That silenced them for a while. The night seemed huge, under a sky populated even by alien stars. Bisesa hadn’t felt quite so stranded since the moment of the Discontinuity, and she ached for Myra.
Abdikadir said gently, “Ruddy, your parents meant the best, didn’t they? It’s just that you didn’t understand how you felt.”
Josh said, “Are you suggesting that whoever is responsible for what has happened to the world—God or not—actually means well?”
Abdikadir shrugged. “We are human, and the world has been transformed by forces that are clearly superhuman. Why should we expect to understand the motives behind such forces?”
Ruddy said, “All right. But do any of us actually believe there can be benevolence behind this meddling?”
Nobody replied.
14: LAST ORBIT
Suddenly it was their last orbit: perhaps the last orbit of Earth ever to be traveled by humans, Kolya thought wistfully. But the necessary preparation was unchanged, and once their training kicked in, the three of them began to work together as effectively as they had since the start of this strange adventure. In fact Kolya suspected they were all comforted by the familiar routine.
The first task was to pack the living compartment with their garbage—including most of the contents of their post-landing survival kit, already consumed. Sable stowed her scavenged ham radio gear in the descent compartment, however, for it could still be useful after landing.
Now it was time to suit up. They took turns in the living compartment. First Kolya pulled on his elasticized trousers, tight enough to squeeze body fluids up toward his head, which ought to help him avoid fainting after the landing—invaluable but grossly uncomfortable. Next he pulled himself into the suit itself. He had to climb in legs first through a hole in the stomach area. The inner layer, of a tough rubbery material, was airtight, and the outer layer, of a hardy man-made fabric, was equipped with pockets, zippers and flaps. Under gravity this assembly would have been all but impossible to don without the support of the ground crew. But here he thrashed around until he got his legs in place, his arms in the sleeves, the back fitting snugly. He was used to his suit; it even smelled like him, and in case of disaster it would save his life. But after the freedom of weightlessness he felt as if he had been locked up inside a tractor tire.
Suited up, he scrambled back down into the descent compartment. The three of them strapped in. Musa had them don their helmets and gloves, and ran a pressure check on the suits.
For the last time the Soyuz passed over India, and their radio footprint reached Jamrud. The little speaker Sable had rigged to her ham radio gear crackled to life.
“. . . Othic calling Soyuz, come in. Soyuz, Othic, come in . . .”
Musa called, “Soyuz here, Casey. How is our trusty capcom today?”