Time's Eye (10 page)

“Not in my day,” she said. “Not in the British army anyhow. Peacekeeping: that’s what we go out in the world for. Of course sometimes you have to kill—or even wage war to keep the peace—and that’s a whole other set of issues.”

He lay back, staring at the stars. “It’s strange to hear you speak of your troubles with your family, failed communication, lost ambitions. I tend to imagine, when I think of it, that the people of a hundred and fifty years hence will be too wise for that—too
evolved
, as Professor Darwin would say!”

“Oh, I don’t think we’re very evolved, Josh. But we’re getting smarter about some things. Religion, for instance. Take Abdikadir and Casey. Devout Muslim and jock Christian, you’d think they are as far apart as can be. But they are both Oikumens.”

“That word is from the Greek—like ecumenical?”

“Yes. Over the last few decades we’ve been close to an all-out conflict between Christianity and Islam. If you take a long view, it’s absurd; both religions have deep common roots, and both are basically creeds of peace. But all the high-level attempts at reconciliation, conferences of bishops and mullahs, came to nothing. The Oikumens are a grassroots movement trying to achieve what all the top-level contact has failed to do. They are so low-profile they are almost underground, but they’re there, burrowing away.”

This talk made him realize how remote in time her age was, and how little he could understand of it. He said cautiously, “And has God been banished in your day, as some thinkers would predict?”

She hesitated. “Not banished, Josh. But we understand ourselves better than we used to. We understand why we
need
gods. There are some in my time who see all religion as a psychopathology. They point to those who are prepared to torture and kill their coreligionists, for the sake of a few percent difference in obscure ideology. But there are others who say that for all their flaws the religions are attempts to address the most basic questions about existence. Even if they tell us nothing about God, they’re surely telling us a great deal about what it means to be human. The Oikumens hope that by unifying religions, the result won’t be a dilution but an enrichment—like the ability to study a precious gem from many angles. And maybe these tentative steps are our best hope of a true enlightenment in the future.”

“It sounds utopian. And is it working?”

“Slowly, like the peacekeeping. If we’re building a utopia we’re doing it in the dark. But we’re trying, I guess.”

“It’s a beautiful vision,” he breathed. “The future must be a marvelous place.” He turned to her. “How strange all this is. How exhilarating—to be here with you—to be castaways in time, together! . . .”

She reached out and touched his lips with one fingertip. “Goodnight, Josh.” She rolled away, pulled her poncho over her body, and curled up.

He lay down, his pulse thumping.

The next day the ground rose steadily, becoming broken and lifeless. The clear air thinned and grew colder, bitterly cold when the wind from the north blew, despite the brightness of the sun. By now it was obvious there was no threat from Pashtuns or anybody else, and Batson allowed the troops to abandon the slow routine of picketing and march more briskly.

Though Bisesa’s all-weather flight suit kept her reasonably protected, the others suffered. As they struggled into the wind the soldiers wrapped themselves up in their blankets and groused about how they should have brought their winter greatcoats. Both Ruddy and Josh became subdued, locked in themselves, as if the wind was leaching the energy out of them. But nobody had expected these conditions; even old Frontier hands said they had never known such a chill in March.

Still they marched doggedly along. Most of the time even Kipling didn’t complain; he was too cold to bother, he said.

Fourteen of the twenty troopers were Indian. It seemed to Bisesa that the Europeans kept away from the
sepoys
, and that the Indians had poorer equipment and weapons.

Ruddy said, “Once the proportion of British troops to Indian was about one in ten. But the Mutiny shattered all that. Now there’s one European for every three Indians. The best weaponry, and all the artillery pieces, are in the hands of British troops, though the Indians may be used as muleteers. You don’t want to train up and arm potential insurgents; common sense, that. Remember that the Indian Civil Service employs only about a thousand people—brave men of the plains, all!—to administer a country of four hundred
million.
It is only the backing of force that enables such a bluff to be played effectively.”

“But that’s why,” she said gently, “you have to train up an Indian elite. This isn’t America, or Australia. There’s no way British colonists or their descendants will ever outnumber the Indians.”

Ruddy shook his head. “You’re talking of our growing crowd of
babus—
with all respect to yourself! That notion might wash in London, but not here. You must know of Lucknow, where the whites were summarily slaughtered!
That’s
the tinderbox we’re sitting on. We may be withholding the best guns, but by filling a
babu
’s head with visions of liberty and self-determination you are handing him the most potent weapons of all—weapons he isn’t yet mature enough to use.”

Such casual patronizing set Bisesa’s teeth on edge. But she knew that Ruddy was actually representative of his class, if more articulate than most. It was some consolation to her to know that Ruddy was quite wrong about the future—even what would unravel in his own lifetime. The confrontation between Cossacks and
sowars
in Central Asia, so long feared in London, would never come to pass. In fact Russia and Britain came to be allies in the face of a new enemy common to both, in the person of the Kaiser. The Empire had always been about acquisition and profit, but Britain’s legacy in this region wasn’t all bad. It did leave India with a functioning civil service, and right up to Bisesa’s time India remained the second-largest democracy in the world, second only to Europe. But the well-intended partition imposed when the Raj withdrew caused tensions from the beginning, tensions that resulted in the terrible destruction of Lahore.

That was the old history, though, she reminded herself. Just in the few days they had been here, she thought she detected a change in the
sepoys’
attitude. They were not quite so respectful to the whites, as if they now knew something of the future—that
babus
like Gandhi, and Bisesa herself, would eventually win. Even if time somehow stitched itself back together again, she couldn’t believe that this bit of history, polluted by her own present, could ever be quite the way it had been before.

Soon they found themselves clambering through high-shouldered hills, and as the northern wind was funneled into steep-walled valleys and gorges the going got tougher still. But these were just foothills.

At last they broke through a final cluttered valley, and emerged to face a view of the mountains themselves. The peaks were clad in bright gray-white glaciers that descended from their summits and tumbled down their flanks. Even from here, still kilometers away, Bisesa could hear the groan and crack of the ice rivers as they forced their way down the gouged flanks of the mountains.

They all stopped in their tracks, quite stunned.

“Good God,” said Ruddy. “The
sepoys
are saying, it wasn’t like
this
before.”

Bisesa dug out her night-vision goggles, and set them to a binocular setting. She scanned the base of the mountains. Beyond the peaks the ice stretched away, she saw; this was the edge of an ice cap. “I think this is a piece of the Ice Age.”

Ruddy, shivering, had wrapped his arms around his bulk. “
Ice Age
. . . Yes . . . I have heard of the phrase. A Professor Agassiz, I think . . . controversial idea . . . Controversial no more, then!”

“Another time slip?” Josh asked.

“Look.” Bisesa pointed at the base of the mountains. The glaciers there came to an abrupt halt, making a cliff. But the glaciers continued to pour off the mountains in their slow, inexorable way, and Bisesa could see how the cliff was splintering, calving off chunks like great landlocked icebergs, revealing clefts of a piercing blue. At the base of the cliff the ice was already melting, and slow floods were seeping out toward the lower ground. “I think that’s another interface. Like the step on the plain. Could be a jump anything from ten thousand years to two million years deep.”

“Yes,” said Josh, his breath steaming. “I see it. Another boundary between worlds—eh, Ruddy?”

But poor nearsighted Kipling could see little through his frosted spectacles.

“We should head back,” Batson said, his teeth chattering. “We’ve seen what we came to see, and can go no further.” The men concurred.

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?”