He dug out a tooth cleaner from a compartment on the wall. This was a bit of muslin impregnated with highly flavored toothpaste that you slipped over your finger and worked around your mouth. Kolya used this carefully, sucking every last bit of minty flavor out of the scrap of cloth; somehow the taste seemed to assuage his thirst a little.
And that was his day begun. He couldn’t wash, for they had long since run out of the soft flannels that you usually used to wash your body and your hair. No doubt they all smelled as bad as the Cossack jockstraps upstairs. But at least they were all the same.
As Musa continued to call plaintively into the dark, Kolya turned to his own self-appointed program of work, which was a study of the Earth.
In his long hours in space, Kolya had always derived great pleasure from watching Earth. The Station, like Soyuz now, orbited only a few hundred kilometers above the surface, so to him the planet had none of the sense of isolation and fragility that the travelers to Mars reported, when they looked back at the blue island where they had been born. To Kolya Earth was huge—and all but empty.
Half of every orbit took him over the great wastes of the Pacific, a sky-blue expanse broken only by the wakes of occasional ships, a dusting of islands. Even land masses were mostly empty of people: across Asia and north Africa the deserts stretched, unmarked save by the smoke of an occasional campfire. Human habitation was confined largely to the coasts, or the river valleys. But even cities were difficult to make out from orbit; when he searched for Moscow or London, Paris or New York, he might make out only a bubbling grayness, fading into the green-brown of the countryside beyond.
It was not the fragility of the Earth that impressed him, then, but its immensity; and it was not the grandeur of man’s conquest of the planet that was so obvious, but the smallness of human tenure, even in the mid-twenty-first century.
But all that was before the metamorphosis.
He clung to what was familiar. The geometry of Earth seen from low orbit was unchanged: every ninety minutes he could watch the sun rise with startling swiftness through the layers of atmosphere, the light brightening from crimson, orange, to yellow, in smoothly curving bands. And the shapes and positions of the continents, the deserts, the distribution of the mountains in their ranges—all those were much as they had been.
But beneath those sunrises, within the frames of the continents, there were many peculiarities.
There had been shifts in the patterns of the ice sheets. Over the Himalayas, he could clearly make out glaciers pouring off the sides of the mountains, clawing their way toward the lower ground. The Sahara, meanwhile, had not remained a desert, not entirely. Here and there new oases had sprung up, patches of green that could be fifty kilometers on a side, bordered by straight-line segments. Similarly he observed bits of desert somehow stuck into the green expanses of the South American rain forests. The world was suddenly a clumsy patchwork. But those odd patches of green in the desert were already fading, he observed as the days wore on, the greenery browning, visibly dying.
If the effects of the changes on the physical world were relatively subtle, the impact on humanity was dramatic.
By day the cities and farms had always been hard to make out from orbit. But now even the great roadways that had once spanned the red center of Australia had vanished. Britain, its shape easily recognizable, seemed to be covered from the Scottish borders to the Channel coast by a thick blanket of forest: Kolya recognized the Thames, but it was much broader than he remembered, and there was no sign of London. Once Kolya made out a bright orange-yellow glow in the middle of the North Sea. It appeared to be a burning oil rig. A great black plume of smoke rose from it and feathered out over Western Europe. As their radio footprint crossed over, Musa tried desperately to make radio contact. But there was no reply, and no sign of ships or planes coming to the aid of the stricken rig.
And so on. If the day side of the world was transformed, the night side was heartbreaking. The city lights, once glowing necklaces around the necks of the continents, were gone, all extinguished.
Everywhere he looked it was the same—save for a few, a very few exceptions. In the middle of a desert, he would make out the spark of a campfire, though he had learned he could be fooled by lightning-struck blazes. There was a denser scattering of fires in Central Asia, near the Mongolian border. There even seemed to be a city in what had been Iraq, but it was small and isolated, and at night its glow was flickering, as if from fires and lanterns, not electricity. Sable claimed she saw some signs of habitation at the site of Chicago. Once the Soyuz crew was excited by the glimpse of an extensive glow along the western seaboard of the continental United States. But that turned out to be a tectonic fault, rivers of lava pouring from a ruptured ground, soon obscured by great billows of ash and dust.
To a first approximation, humanity was gone: that was all you could say about it. And as for Kolya’s own family, Nadia and the boys, Moscow had vanished; Russia was empty.
The crew cautiously discussed what could have caused this tremendous metamorphosis. Perhaps some great war could have left the world depopulated; that seemed the most likely hypothesis. But if so, surely they would have heard the military commands, seen the sparks of ICBMs rising, heard desolate cries for help—seen cities burn, God help them. And what possible force could pick up blocks of ice or tracts of green, dozens of kilometers on a side, and plant them so out of place?
These discussions never went very far. Perhaps they all lacked the imagination to deal with what they saw. Or perhaps they feared that by talking about it they would somehow make it real.
Kolya tried to be analytical. The Soyuz’s external sensor pod was functioning well. Designed to photograph the Station’s exterior, the pod had a virtually unlimited electronic capacity for storing images. It had been easy for Kolya to reconfigure the pod so that it pointed downward at the Earth. The Soyuz’s orbit, a shadow of the vanished Station’s, did not cover the whole planet, but it did loop far from the equator, and as the Earth turned beneath them so new segments of the planet were brought into the cameras’ view. Kolya would be able to create a photographic record from orbit of the state of Earth, covering a great swath to north and south.
Patiently, as the lonely Soyuz circled, Kolya tried to put aside preconceptions, to control his emotions and his fears, and simply to record what he saw, what was there. But it was strange to think that somewhere in the pod’s vast electronic memory were stored the images of the Station they had taken just after separation—images of a Station now somehow vanished, its loss a grace note in the unfolding symphony of strangeness around them.
Sable demanded to know what was the point of this patient recording. Her ham radio project, by comparison, was aimed at establishing communications that could enable them to survive; what use were all these images? Kolya didn’t feel the need to justify himself. There was surely nobody else in a position to do it—and Earth, he felt, deserved a witness to its metamorphosis.
And besides, as far as he knew, his wife and boys were gone. If that were true, then what was the point of anything they did?
The climate seemed restless: great low pressure systems prowled the oceans, and pushed their way toward the land, spinning off huge electrical storms. Seen from space the storms were wonders, with lightning flickering and branching between the clouds, releasing chain reactions that could span a continent. And at the equator clouds stacked up in great heaps that seemed to be straining toward him, and sometimes he imagined the Soyuz might plunge into those thunderheads. Perhaps the sea and the air had been as churned up as the land. As the days wore by the seeing slowly worsened. But, oddly, the increasing obscurity made him feel better about his situation—as if he was a child, able to believe that the badness had gone away if he couldn’t see it.
When it got too hard to bear Kolya would turn to his lemon tree. This tree, bonsai small, had been the subject of one of his experiments on the Station. After the first day in the Soyuz he had dug it out of it
s packaging and now kept it in the little space under his seat. One day, aboard great liners sailing between the worlds, people would have grown fruit in space, and Kolya might have been remembered as a pioneer in a new way of cultivating life beyond the Earth itself. Those possibilities were all gone now, it seemed, but the little tree remained. He would hold it up to the sunlight that streamed in through the windows, and sprinkle precious water from his mouth onto its small leaves. If he rubbed the leaves between his fingers, he could smell their tang, and he was reminded of home.
The strangeness of the transformed world beneath its pond of air contrasted with the cozy kitchen-like familiarity of the Soyuz, so that it was as if what they saw beyond the windows was all a light show, not real at all.
About midday on that tenth day Sable stuck her head, upside down, out of the hatch to the living compartment. “Unless you two have another appointment,” she said, “I think we need to talk.”
The others huddled in their couches, under thin silvered survival blankets, avoiding each other’s eyes. Sable twisted into her place.
“We’re running out,” Sable said bluntly. “We’re running out of food, and water, and air and wet wipes, and I’m out of tampons.”
Musa said, “But the situation on the ground has not normalized—”
“Oh, come on, Musa,” Sable snapped. “Isn’t it obvious that the situation never is going to normalize? Whatever has happened to the Earth—well, it looks as if it’s stuck that way. And we are stuck with it.”
“We can’t land,” Kolya said quietly. “We have no ground support.”
“Technically,” Musa said, “we could handle the reentry ourselves. The Soyuz’s automated systems—”
“Yeah,” Sable said, “this is the Little Spaceship That Could, right?”
“There will be no retrieval,” Kolya insisted. “No helicopters, no medics. We have all been in space for three months, plus ten unexpected days. We will be as weak as kittens. We may not even be able to get out of the descent compartment.”
“Then,” Musa growled, “we must ensure we land somewhere close to people—any people—and throw ourselves on their mercy.”
“It’s not a good prospect,” Sable said, “but what choice do we have? To stay on orbit? Is that what you want, Kolya? To sit up here taking pictures until your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth?”
Kolya said, “It might be a better end than whatever awaits us down there.” At least he was in a familiar environment, here in this failing Soyuz. He had literally no idea what might await them on the ground, and he wasn’t sure if he had the courage to face it.
Musa reached over with his bearlike hand and pressed Kolya’s knee. “Nothing in our past—our training, our tradition—has prepared us for an experience like this. But we are Russians. And if we are the last Russians of all, as we may be, then we must live, or die, with suitable honor.”
Sable had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
Kolya, reluctantly, nodded. “So we land.”
“Thank God for that,” Sable said. “Now, the question is—where?”
The Soyuz was designed to come down on land—happily, Kolya realized, for surely an ocean landing, as the Americans had once used, would have been the death of them without support.
“We can decide where to begin the reentry,” Musa said. “But after that we are in the hands of the automatic sequence; once we are dangling from our parachute, we will have little control over our fate. We don’t even have a weather forecast—the wind could drag us hundreds of kilometers. We need the room for a messy landing. That means we have to land in Central Asia, just as our designers intended.”
He seemed to have expected an argument from Sable over that, but she shrugged. “That’s not necessarily a bad idea. There are signs of people in Central Asia—nothing modern, but human habitation, quite a concentration—all those campfires we saw. We need to find people, and that’s as good a place as any to look.” This seemed logical, but Kolya saw a puzzling hardness in the set of her mouth—as if she was calculating, already thinking ahead to the situation beyond the landing.
Musa clapped his hands. “Good. That’s settled. There is no reason to hesitate. Now we must prepare the ship—”
A buzzer sounded from the living compartment.
“Shit,” said Sable. “That’s my ham radio rig.” With a single movement she launched herself up through the hatchway.
The simple detector Sable had rigged up had actually detected two signals. One was a steady pulse, strong but apparently automated, coming out of a site somewhere in the Middle East. The other, though, was a human voice, scratchy and faint.
“. . . Othic. This is Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic, USASF and UN, at Jamrud Fort in Pakistan, broadcasting to any station. Please respond. I am Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic . . .”
Sable grinned, showing gleaming teeth. “An American,” she whooped. “I knew it!” She began to adjust the tangled equipment, eager to reply before the radio footprint of the Soyuz drifted too far.
12: ICE
On the day Bisesa’s scouting party was to set off, the reveille was sounded by a trumpeter at five A.M. Bisesa woke blearily, her body still not quite accustomed to this new time zone, and went to look for her companions.
After a quick breakfast, the party formed up, lightly loaded with gear. A unit of twenty troopers, mostly sepoys, under the command of newly minted Corporal Batson, had been assigned to escort Bisesa—and here were Josh and Ruddy, both of whom insisted they couldn’t possibly miss this jaunt. They were all on foot; Captain Grove, reasonably enough, didn’t want to risk any of his dwindling population of mules. Grove was also uneasy about allowing the journalists to go. But there had been no sightings of Pashtuns to the north and west, not a single sniper’s bullet. Even their villages seemed to have disappeared, as if apart from Jamrud humanity had been scraped off the planet. Grove relented about Ruddy and Josh, but he insisted that the party was to keep to tight military discipline at all times.
Off they marched. Soon Jamrud had disappeared over the horizon, and the world seemed empty, save for themselves. It was the tenth day since Bisesa’s stranding.
The going was tough. They were clambering over country that was little more than a mountainous desert. At noon the heat climbed ferociously, though it was March—if this actually was still a slice of March 1885, of course—and at night, Bisesa was given to understand, the temperature would drop below freezing. Still, Bisesa expected to be comfortable enough in her flight suit, which was made of all-weather fabric manufactured in 2037. The British soldiers were much more poorly equipped, with their serge jackets and pith helmets, and laden down with heavy-duty kit, arms, ammunition, bedding, rations and water. But the men didn’t complain. They were evidently used to their gear, and knowledgeable about ways around its shortcomings, such as using urine to soften boot leather.
As they advanced, following military drill, Batson sent picketing troops out ahead. In a country crowded by hillocks and ridges, three or four of them would clamber up the next commanding feature, covered by the rifles of their comrades, to be sure there were no Pashtuns hiding there. As they made their way further north, some of the hills rose as high as three hundred meters or so above the track, and it could be forty minutes or more before the pickets had reached the high point, but even so the rest of the column would not be moved forward until they were in position and had confirmed the way ahead was clear. It was frustrating, but the routine enforced plenty of rest halts, and they still made respectable progress.
As they marched they found more Eyes. There would be one every few kilometers or so, hovering silently, all apparently identical to the one at Jamrud. Batson marked their positions on a map. But soon these became as familiar as the first Eye, and nobody seemed to notice them—nobody save Bisesa. She found it hard to turn her back on an Eye, as if they really were eyes, watching her pass.
“What a place,” Ruddy announced to Bisesa as they
plodded across one particularly barren stretch. He gestured at the file of sepoys ahead. “Scraps of raw humanity, crushed between the empty sky and the used-up earth underfoot. All of India is like this, one way or another, you know. It’s just that the Frontier is even more so than the rest—a sort of gritty quintessence. One finds it hard to retain one’s dogmatism here.”
“You’re a strange mix of young and old, Ruddy,” she said.
“Why, thank you. I suppose all this footslogging seems primitive to you, with your flying machines and thinking boxes, the marvelous warmaking devilry of futurity!”
“Not at all,” she said. “I’m a soldier myself, remember, and I’ve done my share of footslogging. Armies are all about discipline and focus, regardless of the technology. And anyhow British forces were—sorry, are—technologically advanced for their time. The telegraph can get a message from India to London in a few hours, you have the most advanced ships in the world, and your railways make inland journeys fast. You have what we’d call a rapid-reaction capability.”
He nodded. “A capability that has enabled the inhabitants of a small island to build and hold a global empire, madam.”
As a walking companion Ruddy was always interesting, if not always exactly likeable. He was certainly no soldier. Something of a hypochondriac, he complained continually about his feet, his eyes, his headaches, his back, and other ways in which he felt “seedy.” But he got on with it. During breaks he would sit in the shade of a boulder or a tree, and jot down notes or scraps of poetry in a battered notebook. When he was composing poetry he would sing a little melody, over and over, to serve as the basis of his meter. He was an untidy writer, and with his impulsive, jerky movements he blunted his pencils and tore his paper.