Time's Eye (9 page)

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.

Bisesa still couldn’t believe it was
him.
And for his part, he kept trying to get her to tell him his future.

“We’ve been through this,” she said steadily. “I don’t know that I have the right. And I don’t think you see how strange this experience is for me.”

“How so?”

“To me you are Ruddy, here and now, alive, vivid. And yet there is a shadow from the future over you, a shadow cast by the Kipling you will become.”

“Good Lord,” Josh muttered. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And besides—” She waved a hand at the empty land. “Things have changed, to say the least. Who knows if all the stuff in your biographies is still your true destiny?”

“Ah,” Ruddy said quickly. “But if not—if my lost future has become a phantasm, a teasing dream of a blue devil—then what harm can there be in my hearing about it?”

Bisesa shook her head. “Ruddy, isn’t it enough that I’ve heard your name, a hundred and fifty years from now?”

Ruddy nodded, sagely enough. “You’re right—that bit of news is more than most men could ever know, and I should be grateful to whichever many-limbed deity is responsible for delivering it to me.”

Josh teased him. “Ruddy, how can you be so equable about this? I think you’re the most vain man I ever met. You know, Bisesa, he was convinced he was destined for greatness long before you appeared in our lives. Now he wants you to tell him in person—a correspondent from the future—I think he imagines all this dislocation has been arranged just for him!”

Ruddy’s composure wasn’t disturbed by this at all.

They faced one more bit of strangeness on that first day’s walk.

They came to a disjunction in the ground. It was like a step, cut into the rubble-strewn ground, no more than half a meter high. The exposed wall of the cut was vertical and polished smooth, and the cut marched in a dead straight line from one horizon to another. It would be easy enough to jump up and over it, but the soldiers milled before it, uncertainly.

Josh stood with Bisesa. “Well,” he said, “what do you make of that? It looks to me like a place where somebody has stitched two bits of the world together.”

“I think that’s exactly what it is, Josh,” she murmured. She squatted down and touched the sheer rock surface. “This is a tectonically active region—India crashing into Asia—if you took two chunks of land, separated in time by a few hundred thousand years or more, this is the kind of shift in level you’d expect . . .”

“I scarcely understand you,” Josh admitted.

She stood up, brushing the dirt from her trousers. She reached forward, tentatively, until she had pushed her fingers over the line of disjunction, then she snatched her hand back. She muttered, “What were you expecting, Bisesa—a force field?” Without further hesitation she leapt up to the upper layer, and walked a few paces ahead—into the future, or the past.

Josh and the others scrambled to follow, and they walked on.

At the next rest stop, she took a look at the weal on Ruddy’s cheek, what he called his “Lahore sore.” He thought it had been caused by an ant bite, and it had not responded to his doctor’s prescription of cocaine. Bisesa knew only a little field medicine, but she thought this looked like Leishmania, an affliction caused by a parasite transmitted by sandflies. She treated it with the contents of her med kit. It soon began to clear up. Ruddy would say later that this small incident had convinced him more than anything else, even Bisesa’s spectacular arrival in a crashing helicopter, that she really was from the future.

About four o’clock, Batson called a halt.

In the lee of a hill the troops began assembling the evening’s campsite. They piled up their weapons, took off their equipment and boots, and pulled on the
chaplies—
sandals—they had been carrying in their packs. They passed out small shovels, and everybody, including Josh, Bisesa and Ruddy, set to building a low perimeter wall from loose rubble, and digging out sleeping pits. All of this was for protection against opportunistic attacks by Pashtuns, though they had still seen no Pashtuns that day. It was hard work after a day’s march, but after about an hour it was done. Bisesa volunteered for “stag,” which, Josh worked out, meant sentry duty. Batson was polite enough, but refused.

They settled down for some food: just boiled meat and rice, but appetizing to them all after the long day. Josh made sure he was close to Bisesa. She added little tablets to her food and “Puritabs” to her water, which she said should protect her from infections from the water and the like; her supply of these twenty-first-century miracles wouldn’t last forever, but perhaps long enough to let her system acclimatize—or so she hoped.

She curled up in her pit under her own lightweight poncho, with her belt kit wrapped up as a pillow. She took out a little sky-blue device she called her “phone,” and set it up on the ground before her. Somehow it didn’t seem surprising when the little toy
spoke
to her. “Music, Bisesa?”

“Something distracting.”

Music poured out of the little machine, loud and vibrant. The troops stared, and Batson snapped, “For God’s sake turn it down!” Bisesa complied, but let the music play on quietly.

Ruddy had theatrically clamped his hands over his ears. “By all the gods! What barbarity is that?”

Bisesa laughed. “Come on, Ruddy. It’s an orchestral reworking of a few classic gangsta rap anthems. It’s decades old—grandmother music!”

Ruddy harrumphed like a fifty-year-old. “I find it impossible to believe that Europeans will ever be seduced by such rhythms.” And, pointedly, he picked up his blanket and made for the furthest corner of the little compound.

Josh was left alone with Bisesa. “Of course he likes you, you know.”

“Ruddy?”

“It’s happened before—he is drawn to strong older women—there’s a pattern to it. Perhaps he will select you as one of his muses, as he calls them. And perhaps, even if his destiny is now in flux, this startling experience will provide such an imaginative man with new creative directions.”

“I think he did write some futuristic fiction, in his old history.”

“More might be gained than is lost, then . . .”

She toyed with her phone, listening to her strange music, with an expression softened by what he took to be a kind of reverse nostalgia, a nostalgia for the future. He essayed, “Does your daughter like this music?”

“When she was small,” Bisesa said. “We’d dance to it together. But she’s too grown up for it now, all of eight years old. She likes the new synth stars—entirely generated by computer, ah, by machines. Little girls like their idols to be safe, you see, and what’s safer than a simulation?”

He understood little of this, but he was charmed by another glimpse of a culture he could barely understand. He said cautiously, “There must be somebody else you miss—back on the other side.”

She looked at him directly, her eyes shadowed, and he realized to his chagrin that she knew exactly what he was fishing for. “I’ve been single for a while, Josh. Myra’s father died, and there’s been nobody else.” She rested her head on her arm. “You know, apart from Myra it’s not people I’m missing so much as the texture. This little phone should connect me to the world, the whole planet. On every surface there is animation—ads, news, music, color—twenty-four hours a day. It’s a constant rush of information.”

“It sounds clamorous.”

“Perhaps it is. But I’m used to it.”

“There are pleasures to be had here. Breathe . . . Can you smell it? The touch of frost already in the air . . . The burning of the fire—you’ll soon learn to tell one wood from another purely by the scent of its smoke, you know . . .”

“Something else too,” she murmured. “A musk. Like a zoo. There are animals out here. Animals that shouldn’t
be
here, even in your time.”

He reached out impulsively and took her hand. “We’re safe here,” he said. She neither responded nor drew back, and after a while, unsure, he pulled his hand away. “I’m a city boy,” he said. “Boston-born. So all this—the openness—is new to me too.”

“What brought you here?”

“Nothing planned. I was always curious, you know—always wanted to see what was around the corner, on the next block. I kept volunteering for one crazy assignment after another, until I landed up here, at the ends of the earth.”

“Oh, you’ve gone rather farther than that, Josh. But I think you’re just the type to cope with our strange adventure.” She was watching him, a hint of humor in her eyes—toying with him, perhaps.

He continued doggedly, “You don’t seem much like the soldiers I know.”

She yawned. “My parents were farmers. They owned a big eco-friendly spread in Cheshire. I was an only child. The farm was going to be mine to work and develop—I loved that place. But when I was sixteen my father sold it out from under me. I suppose he thought I was never serious about running it.”

“But you were.”

“Yes. I’d even applied for a place at agricultural college. It caused a rift, or maybe showed one up. I wanted to get away. I moved to London. Then, as soon as I was old enough, I joined up. Of course I had no idea what the army would be like—the PT, the drill, the weapons, the field craft—but I took to it.”

“I don’t see you as a killer,” he said. “But that’s what soldiers do.”