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. SoCasey, propping himself up on a crutch, had used a bit of chalk to sketch an outline Mercator-projection world map onto the choppers 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 were looking at landmasses that have been replaced, in patches, by bits of themselves from earlier eras. But so far as we can tellgiven the Soyuz wasnt properly equipped, and alltheres 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 havent 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 dont think there can be any scrap thats more than two million years old.
Ruddy laughed, a little wildly. Only two million yearsthats 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 centermaybe 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. Its 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 Earths climate fluctuates on longer cyclesIce Ages come and goand thats 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 thats 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 dont 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. Hadnt 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 overheadpure chancewhen the Discontinuity hit, and they were brought along with us. He rubbed his fleshy nose. Weve tried to map the time slices, and in some places we can. Heres 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 theyre half a million years apart in time. Still, its 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 doesnt extend nearly so far south, and there are lakes, patches of green. Thats just an average, though; on the ground its 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 advancedstreaks 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 dont know who they are.
He continued his show-and-tell, guiding his reluctant audience around a transformed world. Australia looked exotic. Though much of its center was burned red raw, just as in Bisesas 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 scrapand, 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 Bisesas 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 upand 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 Americas fauna.
Abdikadir said, What about Alaska? The shape looks odd to me.
Casey said, Its extending toward Beringiayou know, the land bridge that once stretched from Asia to America across the Bering Straitsthe way the first humans walked into North America. But its 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 villagesperhaps 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 Hadrians 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.