Youre 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. Im a soldier myself, remember, and Ive done my share of footslogging. Armies are all about discipline and focus, regardless of the technology. And anyhow British forces weresorry, 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 wed 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 couldnt believe it was him. And for his part, he kept trying to get her to tell him his future.
Weve been through this, she said steadily. I dont know that I have the right. And I dont 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 hadnt 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 notif my lost future has become a phantasm, a teasing dream of a blue devilthen what harm can there be in my hearing about it?
Bisesa shook her head. Ruddy, isnt it enough that Ive heard your name, a hundred and fifty years from now?
Ruddy nodded, sagely enough. Youre rightthat 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 youre 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 persona correspondent from the futureI think he imagines all this dislocation has been arranged just for him!
Ruddys composure wasnt disturbed by this at all.
They faced one more bit of strangeness on that first days 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 thats exactly what it is, Josh, she murmured. She squatted down and touched the sheer rock surface. This is a tectonically active regionIndia crashing into Asiaif 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 youd 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, Bisesaa force field? Without further hesitation she leapt up to the upper layer, and walked a few paces aheadinto 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 Ruddys cheek, what he called his Lahore sore. He thought it had been caused by an ant bite, and it had not responded to his doctors 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 Bisesas spectacular arrival in a crashing helicopter, that she really was from the future.
About four oclock, Batson called a halt.
In the lee of a hill the troops began assembling the evenings campsite. They piled up their weapons, took off their equipment and boots, and pulled on the chaplies sandalsthey 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 days 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 wouldnt last forever, but perhaps long enough to let her system acclimatizeor 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 didnt 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 Gods 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. Its an orchestral reworking of a few classic gangsta rap anthems. Its decades oldgrandmother 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?
Its happened beforehe is drawn to strong older womentheres 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. Wed dance to it together. But shes too grown up for it now, all of eight years old. She likes the new synth starsentirely generated by computer, ah, by machines. Little girls like their idols to be safe, you see, and whats safer than a simulation?