Here, said Bisesa suddenly. She had stopped before a scraping in the ground. Stepping closer, Josh saw that the earth was fresh and moist, as if recently dug.
Its a foxhole, Ruddy said. He hopped down into the hole, and brandished a length of pipe, like a bit of drainpipe. And is this the fearsome weapon that shot you out of the sky?
Thats the RPG launcher, yes. She peered east. There was a village just over there. A hundred meters, no more. The soldiers held up their lanterns. There was no village to be seen, nothing but the rocky plain that seemed to stretch to the horizon. Perhaps there is a boundary near here, Bisesa breathed. A boundary in time. What a strange thought. What is happening to us? She lifted her face to the Moon. Oh. Clavius is gone.
Josh was at her side. Clavius?
Clavius Base. She pointed. Built into a big old crater in the southern highlands.
Josh stared. You have cities on the Moon ?
She smiled. I wouldnt call it a city. But you can see its light, like a captured star, the only one in the circle of the crescent Moon. Now its gone. That isnt even my Moon. There is a crew on Mars, and a second on the wayor there was. I wonder whats become of them
There was a grunt of disgust. One of the soldiers had been rooting at the bottom of the foxhole, and now emerged with what looked like a piece of meat, still dripping blood. The stink was sharp.
A human arm, Ruddy said flatly. He turned away and vomited.
Josh said, It looks to me like the work of a great cat It seems that whoever attacked you did not live long to enjoy his triumph.
I suppose he was as lost as I am.
Yes. I apologize for Ruddy. He doesnt have a very strong stomach for such sights.
No. And he never will.
Josh looked at her; her eyes were full of moonlight, her expression empty. What do you mean?
He was right. I do know who he is. Youre Rudyard Kipling, arent you? Rudyard bloody Kipling. My God, what a day.
Ruddy didnt respond. He was hunched over, still retching, and bile stained his chin.
At that moment the ground trembled, hard enough to raise little clouds of dust everywhere, like invisible footfalls. And rain began to fall, from thick black clouds that came racing across the Moons empty face.
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 Abdis insistence, desperate for sleep, she cracked her survival gear. She donned earplugs and eye shades, swallowed a Halcyon tabletwhat Casey called a Blue Bomberand 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, Bisesas phone muttered about its continuing cauterization, no SAR teams came flapping out of the UN base in response to their patiently bleeping beaconsthere 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 didnt even want to confront those feelings, as if acknowledging them would make her separation from Myra real. She longed to have something to doanything 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 werent 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 Birds crew had been Russian, German or Chinese, sayand there were plenty of such troops in Claviusthere 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 dont think the British understand all this at all, and maybe we understand too well. When H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895ten 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 implicationsstrange though the experience is to actually live through.
But that doesnt 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 heredid 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. Ill tell you what to do about itwork! 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 Bisesas 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 structurewherever 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.