Such casual patronizing set Bisesas 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 futureeven 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 Britains legacy in this region wasnt all bad. It did leave India with a functioning civil service, and right up to Bisesas 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 futurethat babus like Gandhi, and Bisesa herself, would eventually win. Even if time somehow stitched itself back together again, she couldnt 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 wasnt 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 thats 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 worldseh, Ruddy?
But poor nearsighted Kipling could see little through his frosted spectacles.
We should head back, Batson said, his teeth chattering. Weve seen what we came to see, and can go no further. The men concurred.
Bisesas 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 Groves 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 wasnt 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 wasnt 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 humannot quitebut 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 didnt get any easier. It was a rare day now when the sky didnt 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 Caseys improvised receiving station. Casey used what was left of the Little Birds 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 Indias teardrop shape or Britains 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 manhow petty his pretensions and passionshow 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 Caseys 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.