Time's Eye

  “The rain is pissing on me. More important, how are you?”

  Musa glanced at his crew. “We are strapped in, tight as three bugs in a rug. Our systems check out, despite the additional time we have spent in orbit. We are ready for the descent.”

  “That Soyuz is a tough old bird.”

  “That she is. I will be sorry to say good-bye to her.”

  “Musa, you understand we have no way of tracking you. We won’t know where you come down.”

  “We know where you are,” Musa said. “We will find you, my friend.”

  “God and Karl Marx willing.”

  Kolya, suddenly, urgently, didn’t want this contact to be lost. They were all aware that Casey and his people were just another handful of castaways, as lost and helpless as they were. But at least Casey’s was a twenty-first century voice, reaching them from the ground; it was almost as if they had touched home again.

  “I must say something.” Musa put his hand to his wraparound headset. “Casey, Bisesa, Abdikadir—and Sable and Kolya—all of you. We are far from home. We have come on a journey whose nature we can’t even grasp. And I think it’s clear that this new world, made of patches snipped from space and time, is not ours: it is made from pieces of Earth, but it is not Earth. So I think we should not call this new world, our world, ‘Earth.’ We need a new name.”

  Casey said, “Like what?”

  “I have thought about this,” Musa said. “Mir. We should call this new planet Mir.”

  Sable guffawed. “You want to call a planet after an antique Russian space station?”

  But Kolya said, “I understand. In our language the word Mir can mean both ‘world’ and ‘peace.’ ”

  “We like the idea down here,” Casey said.

  “Then Mir it is,” said Musa.

  Sable shrugged. “Whatever,” she said cruelly. “So you got to name a world, Musa. But what does a name matter?”

  Kolya murmured, “You know, I wonder where we would all be if we hadn’t happened to be in just that bit of the sky, just at that moment.”

  Casey said, “Too much double dome horseshit for a jock like me. I can’t even keep . . . rain out . . . neck.”

  Musa glanced at Kolya. “Your signal is breaking up.”

  “Yeah . . . likewise . . . losing you . . .”

  “Yes. Good-bye for now, Casey—”

  “ . . . won’t be a welcome back. Welcome to your new home—welcome to Mir! . . .”

  The signal faded out.

  15: NEW WORLD

  Not long after dawn, Bisesa and Abdikadir made for the wreck of the chopper. The overnight rain continued unrelenting, stippling the muddy parade ground with tiny craters. Abdikadir briefly pulled back the hood of his poncho and lifted up his face to the rain, tasting it. “Salty,” he said. “Big storms out there.”

  A lean-to had been set up against the side of the downed chopper. Huddled under the canvas, Casey and the British were all so splashed with mud they looked as if they had been molded out of the earth themselves. But Cecil de Morgan wore his customary suit, and was almost dapper despite a few splashes. Bisesa would never like the man, but she admired his defiance of nature.

  Captain Grove had requested a briefing from Casey on what had been discovered so far. So Casey, propping himself up on a crutch, had used a bit of chalk to sketch an outline Mercator-projection world map onto the chopper’s hull, and he had set up a softscreen on a trestle chair before it. “Okay,” Casey said briskly. “First the big picture.” The dozen officers and civilians, standing in the uncertain shelter of the lean-to, clustered to see, as images of a changed world flickered by.

  The shapes of the continents were familiar enough. But within their coastlines the land was a jigsaw of irregular slices, of browning green or melting white, showing how the peculiar fragmentation of time had occurred all across the planet. Few people seemed to have made it through the Discontinuity. The night side of the world was almost complete darkness, broken only by a scattered handful of brave, defiant man-made lights. And then there was the weather. Great storm systems boiled out of the oceans, or the poles, or the hearts of the continents, and thunderstorms spanned continents with branching purple-gray pyrotechnics.

  Casey tapped the world map. “We think we’re looking at landmasses that have been replaced, in patches, by bits of themselves from earlier eras. But so far as we can tell—given the Soyuz wasn’t properly equipped, and all—there’s only a slight shift in the overall position of the landmasses. That limits us in time, even though we think the small shifts that do exist might be enough to trigger volcanism, later on.”

  Already Ruddy had his hand up. “Of course the landmasses haven’t shifted, as you put it. Why should they? . . .”

  Casey growled, “For you, Alfred Wegener is a five-year-old boy. Tectonic plates. Drifting continents. Long story. Take my word.”

  Bisesa asked, “How deep in time, Casey?”

  “We don’t think there can be any scrap that’s more than two million years old.”

  Ruddy laughed, a little wildly. “Only two million years—that’s a comfort, is it?”

  Casey said, “The time slices presumably extend up from the surface of the Earth, and down at least some distance to its center—maybe all the way. Maybe each slice is a great spiky wedge of core, mantle, crust and sky.”

  Grove said, “And each patch brought its own vegetation, inhabitants, a column of air above it?”

  “Looks like it. It’s the mixing of the patches that we think is stirring up the weather.” He tapped the softscreen. It displayed images of massive tropical storms, creamy-white swirls pouring up from the southern Atlantic to batter the eastern American seaboard, and fronts of bubbling black cloud laced across Asia. Casey said, “Some of the slices must be from summer, some from winter. And the Earth’s climate fluctuates on longer cycles—Ice Ages come and go—and that’s all mixed in too.” He showed images of a slab of icebound land, a neat near-rectangle set square over the site of Paris in France. “Hot air rises above cold, and that causes the winds; hot air holds more water vapor than cold air, and over cool land it dumps it out, and that’s your rain. And so on. As all that works itself out, we get this screwed-up weather.”

  Abdikadir said, “How far do these slices extend upward?”

  “We don’t know,” Casey said.

  “Not as far as the Moon, surely,” piped up Corporal Batson. “Or that body would have vanished, or be scattered about its orbit.”

  Casey raised his eyebrows. “Good point. Hadn’t thought of that. But we do know it reaches out at least as far as low Earth orbit.”

  “The Soyuz,” Bisesa said.

  “Yeah. Bis, their clocks agree with ours, to the second. They must have been flying overhead—pure chance—when the Discontinuity hit, and they were brought along with us.” He rubbed his fleshy nose. “We’ve tried to map the time slices, and in some places we can. Here’s the Sahara . . .” He showed patches of greenery in the desert, mostly irregularly shaped, but some were bounded by geometrically pure arcs and straight lines. “One patch of desert looks much the same as another, even if they’re half a million years apart in time. Still, it’s possible to date some of the patches, roughly, from geological changes.”

  He turned and drew a big chalk asterisk on central Africa. “This seems to be the oldest area of all. You can tell by the width of the Rift Valley . . . And look; the Sahara doesn’t extend nearly so far south, and there are lakes, patches of green. That’s just an average, though; on the ground it’s all mixed up.” More images blurred by. “We think much of Asia is from the last couple of thousand years or so. You see scattered human habitations out on those steppes, but nothing advanced—streaks of smoke from campfires, no electric lights. The biggest concentration of people looks to be here.” He tapped an area north of China, in eastern Asia. “We don’t know who they are.”

  He continued his show-and-tell, guiding his reluctant audience around a transformed world. Aus
tralia looked exotic. Though much of its center was burned red raw, just as in Bisesa’s time, around the coasts and in the river valleys the greenery was thick and luxurious. A few high-magnification shots were detailed enough to show animals. Bisesa made out a thing like a hippo, browsing at greenery at the edge of a forest scrap—and, in a short animated sequence, a herd of some huge upright creature came leaping out of cover, perhaps fleeing some predator. They were giant kangaroos, Bisesa thought; Australia seemed to have reverted to its virgin state before the arrival of humans. South America meanwhile was a bank of solid green: the rain forest, decimated and dying in Bisesa’s time, restored to its antique glory here.

  In North America a great slab of ice lay sprawled across the north and east, extending up to the pole and down to the latitude of the Great Lakes. Casey said, “The ice in this area comes from different ages. You can see that by the gaps, and the ragged edges.” He showed close-ups of the southern edge of the cap, which looked like a piece of paper, ripped across roughly. Bisesa could see glaciers pouring off that ragged edge, great ice-dammed lakes of floodwater building up—and ferocious storm systems pooling, presumably where cold Ice Age air spilled off the cap and ran over warmer land. To the south of the ice the land was a bare green-brown: tundra, locked in by permafrost, scoured by the winds off the ice cap. At first glance she could see no sign of people; but then, she recalled, people were a recent addition to America’s fauna.

  Abdikadir said, “What about Alaska? The shape looks odd to me.”

  Casey said, “It’s extending toward Beringia—you know, the land bridge that once stretched from Asia to America across the Bering Straits—the way the first humans walked into North America. But it’s been cut off; the sea has broken through . . .”

  The tour continued, relentlessly; they watched the flickering images uneasily.

  “And Europe?” Ruddy asked, his voice tight. “England?”

  Casey showed them Europe. Much of the continent was covered by dense green forest. On the more open southern regions in France, Spain, Italy there were settlements, but they were just scattered villages—perhaps not even constructed by humans, Bisesa mused, recalling that southern Europe had been in the range of the Neanderthals. There was certainly nothing human to be seen in England, which, south of the line of what would have been Hadrian’s Wall, was a slab of dense, unbroken forest. Further north the pine forest was marred by a great white scar that straddled the Scottish Highlands, a rogue section of ice cap escaped from a glaciation age.

  “It is gone,” said Ruddy. Bisesa was surprised to see his eyes, behind his thick spectacles, were misting. “Perhaps it is because I was born abroad that this affects me so. But Home is gone, all of it, all that history down to the Romans and even deeper, vanished like dew.”

  Captain Grove put a scarred hand on his shoulder. “Chin up, man. We’ll clear that bloody forest and build our own history if we have to, you’ll see.”

  Ruddy nodded, seeming unable to speak.

  Casey watched this little melodrama wide-eyed, his gum-chewing briefly suspended. Then he said, “I’ll cut to the chase. The Soyuz found only three sites, on the whole damn planet, where there’re signs of any advanced technical culture—and one of them is right here. The second—” He tapped his graffiti map, at the southern tip of the unmistakable shape of Lake Michigan.

  “Chicago,” Josh breathed.

  “Yeah,” Casey said. “But don’t get your hopes up. We can see dense urban settlement—a lot of smoke, as if from factories—even what look like steamboats on the lake. But they didn’t respond to the Soyuz’s radio signals.”

  “They could be from any era before the development of radio,” Abdikadir said. “Say, 1850. Even then the population was sizable.”

  “Yeah,” Casey growled, pulling up images on his softscreen. “But they have problems of their own right now. They are surrounded by ice. The hinterland has gone—no farmland—and no trade, because there’s nobody to trade with.”

  “And where,” Bisesa said slowly, “is the third advanced site?”

  Casey pulled up an image of the Middle East. “Here. There’s a city—small, we think ancient, not like Chicago. But what’s interesting about it is that Soyuz picked up a radio signal from there—the only one on the planet, save for ours. But it wasn’t like ours. It’s powerful, but regular, just an upward chirp through the frequencies.”

  “A beacon, perhaps,” Abdikadir said.

  “Maybe. It’s not one of our designs.”

  Bisesa peered at the softscreen. The city was set in a broad expanse of green, apparently cultivated land, laced with suspiciously straight waterways, like shining threads. “I think this is Iraq.”

  “That,” said Cecil de Morgan firmly, “is Babylon.”

  Ruddy gasped. “Babylon lives again! . . .”

  “And that’s all,” Casey said. “Just us, and this beacon in Babylon.”

  They fell silent. Babylon: the very name was exotic to Bisesa, and her head buzzed with speculation about how that strange beacon had got there.

  Captain Grove seized the moment. The little man stepped forward, mighty mustache bristling, and he clapped his hands briskly. “Well, thank you, Mr. Othic. Here’s the way I see it. We have to concentrate on our own position, since it’s clear that nobody is about to come to our rescue, so to speak. Not only that, I think we have to find something to do—to give ourselves a goal—it’s time we stop reacting to whatever the gods throw at us, and start taking command.”

  “Here, here,” Ruddy murmured.

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “We must go to Chicago,” Josh said. “With so many people, so much industry, so much potential—”

  “They don’t know we’re here,” Casey said bluntly. “Oh, perhaps they saw Soyuz pass overhead, but even if they did they won’t have understood.”

  “And we have no way to reach them,” Captain Grove said. “We’re scarcely in a position to mount a transatlantic crossing . . . Perhaps in the future. But for now we must put Chicago out of our minds.”

  “Babylon,” said Abdikadir. “It’s the obvious goal. And there’s that beacon: perhaps we will learn more of what has become of us.”

  Grove nodded. “Besides, I like the look of all that green. Wasn’t Babylon an early center of agriculture? The Fertile Crescent and all that? Perhaps we should consider a relocation up there. A march wouldn’t be impossible.”

  Abdikadir smiled. “You’re thinking of farming, Captain?”

  “It’s hardly been my lifelong ambition, but needs must, Mr. Omar.”

  Bisesa pointed out, “But somebody lives there already.”

  Grove’s face hardened. “We’ll deal with that when we get there.” In that moment, Bisesa glimpsed something of the steel that had enabled these British to build an empire that spanned a planet.

  There was no serious alternative suggestion. Babylon it would be.

  The party began to break up into smaller groups, talking, planning. Bisesa was struck by a new sense of purpose, of direction.

  Josh, Ruddy and Abdikadir walked back across the mud with Bisesa. Abdikadir said, “Grove is a smart cookie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His eagerness to go to Babylon. It’s not just so we can plow fields. There will be women there.”

  “Before his men start mutinying, you mean.”

  Josh grinned uneasily. “Think of it: five hundred Adams and five hundred Eves . . .”

  Ruddy said, “You’re right that Grove is a good officer. He’s very aware of the mood in the barrack-rooms and the Mess.” Many of the men who had happened to be at Jamrud during the Discontinuity were “three-year-olds,” Ruddy said, short-service troops. “Few of ’em have pipeclay in the marrow . . .” Pipeclay was the whitener the troops used on their belts. “They’re actually keeping their spirits up remarkably well. But that mood won’t last long, once they realize how little chance there is that any of us is going home any time soon.
Babylon might be just the thing.”

  Abdikadir said, “You know, we are fortunate in having the Soyuz, and so much data. But we’ve lots of unanswered questions. That two-million-year frame is interesting, for instance.”

  “How so?”

  “Because two million years is about the date of the emergence of Homo erectus—the first hominid. Some predecessor species, like the pithecines the British captured, overlapped for a time, but—”

  “You think the time frame has something to do with us?”

  “It may be just a coincidence—but why not one million years, why not twenty, or two hundred million? And the oldest parts of this world-quilt seem to be where we are oldest, and the youngest, like the Americas, where we reached last . . . Perhaps this new world is somehow a representative sampling of human, and hominid, history.”

  She shuddered. “But so much of the world is empty.”

  “The history of Homo sapiens is just the last chapter of the long, slow story of hominid evolution. We are mere dust, floating on the surface of history, Bisesa. Perhaps that’s what the state of this world shows us. It’s a fair sample across time.”

  Josh tugged at Bisesa’s sleeve. “Something has occurred to me—it may not have struck you or the others—but then my perspective, as a man of the nineteenth century, is different . . .”

  “Spit it out, Josh.”

  “You look out at this new world, and you see scraps of your past. But I see a little of my future, too, in you. Why should you be the last—why, Bisesa, is there nothing of your own future?”

  The thought struck her all at once, fully formed; she felt shocked it hadn’t occurred to her. She had no reply.

  “Captain Grove! Over here!” Corporal Batson, on the edge of the parade ground, was waving. Grove hurried over; Bisesa and the others followed.

  Batson was with a small group of soldiers, a British corporal and a number of sepoys, who were holding two men. These strangers had their hands tied behind their back. They were shorter, stockier than the sepoys, and more muscular. They both wore knee-length smocks of faded purple, tied at the waist with bits of rope, and strapped-up leather sandals. Their faces were broad and swarthy and roughly shaved, their black hair curly and cropped short. They were crusted with dried blood, and they were evidently terrified of the sepoys’ guns; when a soldier playfully lifted his rifle, one of the pair cried out and tumbled to his knees.