Time's Eye (7 page)

PART 2

CASTAWAYS IN TIME

10: GEOMETRY

For Bisesa the first morning was the worst.

She suspected that some combination of adrenaline and shock had kept her going through the day of what they were starting to call the Discontinuity. But that night, in the room given to them by Grove, a hastily converted storeroom, she had slept badly on her thin down-stuffed mattress. By the next morning, when she had reluctantly woken up to find herself
still here
, she had come crashing down from her adrenaline high, and felt inconsolable. The second night, at Abdi’s insistence, desperate for sleep, she cracked her survival gear. She donned earplugs and eye shades, swallowed a Halcyon tablet—what Casey called a “Blue Bomber”—and slept for ten hours.

But as the days passed, Bisesa, Abdikadir and Casey were still stuck here in the Jamrud fort. They had no contact on any of their military wavelengths, Bisesa’s phone muttered about its continuing cauterization, no SAR teams came flapping out of the UN base in response to their patiently bleeping beacons—there was no medevac for Casey. And there was not a single contrail to be seen in the sky, not one.

She spent most of her time missing Myra, her daughter. She didn’t even want to confront those feelings, as if acknowledging them would make her separation from Myra real. She longed to have something to do—anything to stop her thinking.

Meanwhile life went on.

After the first couple of days, when it was obvious the Bird crew had no hostile intent, the British troops’ close military scrutiny of them was relaxed a little, though Bisesa suspected Captain Grove was too wary a commander not to keep a weathered eye on them. They certainly weren’t allowed anywhere near the small stash of twenty-first-century pistols, submachine guns, flares and the like that had been extracted from the Bird. But she thought it probably helped these nineteenth-century British accept them that Casey was a white American and that both Bisesa and Abdi could be regarded as belonging to “allied” races. If the Bird’s crew had been Russian, German or Chinese, say—and there were plenty of such troops in Clavius—there might have been more hostility.

But when she thought about it Bisesa was astonished even to be considering such issues, culture clashes spanning the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The whole business was surreal; she felt as if she was walking around in a bubble. And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps across
a million years
or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.

Abdikadir said, “I don’t think the British understand all this at all, and maybe we understand too well. When H. G. Wells published
The Time Machine
in 1895—ten years ahead in this time zone!—he had to spend twenty or thirty pages explaining what a time machine does. Not how it works, you see, but just what it
is.
For us there has been a process of acculturation. After a century of science fiction you and I are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of time travel, and can immediately accept its implications—strange though the experience is to actually live through.”

“But that doesn’t apply to these Victorian-age Brits. To them a Model T Ford would be a fabulous vehicle from the future.”

“Sure. I think for them, the time slips and their implications are simply beyond their imaginations . . . But if H. G. Wells was here—did he ever visit India?—of all thinkers, his mind might explode with the implications of what is happening . . .”

None of this rationalization seemed to help Bisesa. Maybe the truth was that Abdikadir and everybody else felt just as peculiar as she did, but they were just better at hiding it.

Ruddy, though, sympathized with her disorientation. He told her he was occasionally afflicted by hallucinations.

“When I was a child, stranded in an unhappy foster home in England, I once began to punch a tree. Odd behavior I grant you, but nobody understood that I was trying to see if it was my grandmother! More recently in Lahore I came down with a fever that may have been malaria, and since then, on occasion, my ‘blue devils’ have returned. So I know how it is to be plagued by the unreal.” As he spoke to her he leaned forward, intent, his eyes distorted by the thick spectacles Josh called “gig-lamps.” “But you are real enough for me. I’ll tell you what to do about it—work!” He held up stubby fingers stained black with ink. “Sixteen hours a day I put in sometimes. Work, the best bulwark for reality . . .”

So it went, a therapy session on the nature of reality with nineteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling. She walked away more dazed than before it had begun.

As time passed and both parties, the Victorian-age British and Bisesa’s crew, continued to lack communications with their respective outside worlds, Grove grew very concerned.

There were very practical reasons for this; the stores here at the fort would not last long. But Grove was also disconnected from the vast apparatus of the imperial administration, which Bisesa glimpsed in the rapid talk of Ruddy and Josh. Even on the civilian side there were local Commissioners, with staffs of Deputies and Assistants, who reported to a Lieutenant Governor, who reported to a Viceroy, who reported to a Secretary of State, who reported, at last, to the Empress herself, Queen Victoria herself, in far-off London. The British were encouraged to think of themselves as locked into a unified social structure—wherever you served you were a soldier of the Queen, part of her global empire. For Grove to be isolated from this was as disturbing, Bisesa saw, as it was for her to be cut off from the global telecommunications nets of the twenty-first century.

So Grove began to send out scouting patrols, particularly using his
sowars
, his Indian cavalry troopers, who seemed able to cover impressive distances quickly. They reached Peshawar, where the local army cantonment and military command center should have been found—but Peshawar was gone. There was no evidence of destruction, not even of the hideous erasing of a nuclear blast that Bisesa had trained the British to recognize. There was only bare rock, a river bank, scrubby vegetation and the spoor of creatures that might have been lions: it was as if Peshawar had never existed at all. It was a similar story, the
sowar
scouts reported, when they went out to find Clavius, Bisesa’s UN encampment. Not a trace, not even of destruction.

So Grove determined to explore further: down the valley of the Indus, deep into India—and to the north.

Meanwhile Casey, still pretty much immobilized, likewise took on the challenge of making contact with the rest of the world. With the help of a couple of privates from a signal corps assigned by Grove, he scavenged comms gear from the fallen Bird, and improvised a sending and receiving station in a small room in the fort. But no matter how long he spent calling into the dark, there was no reply.

Abdikadir, meanwhile, had his own projects, which concerned the peculiar floating sphere. Bisesa was envious that both Casey and Abdi quickly found useful work to occupy their time, as if they somehow fit in better than she did.

On the fourth morning, Bisesa emerged from the fort to find Abdikadir standing on a stool, holding a battered tin bucket up in the air. Casey and Cecil de Morgan sat on fold-out camp chairs, their faces bathed in the morning sun as they watched the show. Casey waved at Bisesa. “Hey, Bis! Come see the cabaret.” Though de Morgan immediately offered her his chair, Bisesa sat in the dirt beside Casey. She didn’t like de Morgan, and she wasn’t about to give him any kind of leverage over her, however trivial.

Abdikadir’s bucket was full of water, so it must have been heavy. Nevertheless he propped it on his shoulder one-handed, and marked the water’s level with a grease pencil. Then he lowered the bucket, and revealed the floating sphere, the Evil Eye, with water running off its surface; Abdi made sure he caught every drop. The tent containing the two “man-apes” had been set up a few dozen yards away, with some kind of pole at its center.

Casey snickered. “He’s been dunking that damn thing for half an hour already.”

“Why, Abdi?”

“I’m measuring its volume,” Abdikadir murmured. “And I’m repeating it for accuracy. It’s called science. Thanks for your support.” And he lifted the bucket up around the sphere again.

Bisesa said to Casey, “I thought the Surgeon-Captain said you shouldn’t get out of bed.”

Casey blew a raspberry, and thrust his heavily bandaged leg out in front of him. “Ah, bull. It was a clean break and they set it well.” Though without anesthetic, Bisesa knew. “I don’t like sitting around with my thumb up my ass.”

“And you, Mr. de Morgan,” Bisesa said. “What’s your interest in this?”

The factor spread his hands. “I am a businessman, ma’am. That’s why I’m here in the first place. And I am constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Naturally I am intrigued by your downed flying machine! I accept that both you and Captain Grove want to keep that particular item under wraps. But
this
, this floating orb of perfection, is neither yours nor Grove’s—and, in these days of strangeness, how strange it remains, though we have quickly become accustomed to it! There it floats, supported by nothing we can see. No matter how hard you hit it—even with bullets, and that’s been tried, somewhat perilously given the ricochets—you can neither knock a chip out of its perfect surface, nor even move it from its station by so much as a fraction of an inch. Who made it? What holds it up? What lies inside it?”

“And how much is it worth?” Casey growled.

De Morgan laughed easily. “You can’t blame a man for trying.”

Josh had told Bisesa something of de Morgan’s background. His family were failed aristocracy, who could trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror’s first assault on England, more than eight hundred years before, and who had carved a rich estate out of the defeated Saxon kingdoms. In the intervening centuries a “trait of greed and foolishness that transcends the generations,” in de Morgan’s own disarming words, had left the family penniless, though still with a kind of race memory of wealth and power. Ruddy said that in his experience the Raj was plagued by “chancers” like de Morgan. As far as Bisesa was concerned there was nothing to be trusted in de Morgan’s slicked-back black hair, and his darting, questing eyes.

Abdikadir clambered down from his stool. Dark, serious, focused, he switched his watch to calculator mode, and punched in the numbers he had recorded.

“So, Brainiac,” Casey called mockingly, “tell us what you’ve learned.”

Abdikadir settled to the dirt before Bisesa. “The Eye resists our probing, but there are things to measure nonetheless. First of all, the Eye is surrounded by a magnetic anomaly. I checked that with a compass from my survival kit.”

Casey grunted. “My compass has been haywire since we hit the dirt.”

Abdikadir shook his head. “It’s true you can’t find magnetic north; something peculiar seems to be happening to Earth’s magnetic field. But there’s nothing wrong with our compasses themselves.” He glanced up at the Eye. “The flux lines around that thing are packed together. A diagram of it would look like a knot in a piece of wood.”

“How come?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Bisesa leaned forward. “What else, Abdi?”

“I’ve been doing some high school geometry.” He grinned. “Dipping the thing in water was the only way I could think of to measure its volume—seeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.”

“Eureka!”
de Morgan cried playfully. “Sir, you are the Archimedes
de nos jours . . .
”

Abdikadir ignored him. “I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still won’t be too hot. I can’t think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius and circumference are pretty good, I think.” He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. “I adapted a laser sight from the chopper . . .”

“I don’t get it,” said Casey. “It’s just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared . . .”

“You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere you’ve encountered before,” Abdi said mildly. “But here it is floating in the air, like nothing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.”

Bisesa nodded. “And you found—”

“For a start, it is a perfect sphere.” He glanced up again. “And I mean
perfect
, within the tolerances even of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldn’t shape any material to such a fantastic degree of precision.”

De Morgan nodded soberly. “An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.”

“Yes. But that’s just the start.” Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. “Your high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is . . . ?”

“Pi,” rumbled Casey. “Even a jock Christian knows that much.”

“Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye is
three.
Not about three, or a bit more than three—three, to laser precision. My error bars are so small it’s quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to be. Your formulae don’t work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for ‘pi’ from the volume. Although of course my reliability is way down; you can’t compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water . . .”

Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about it. “That’s impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.”

“
Our
universe, yes,” Abdikadir said.

“What do you mean?”

Abdikadir shrugged. “It seems that this sphere—though it is evidently
here—
is not quite of our universe. We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.”

“If that’s so,” Casey rumbled, “who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?”