He gulped at the water gratefully. Sweat was already standing out on his brow and soaking into his collar.
She dug her hands into the dirt. It crumbled, pale, lifeless and dry. But something shone in it, fragments that glittered when exposed to the overhead sun. She dug them out and laid them on her palm. They were coin-sized fragments of glass, opaque, their edges ragged. She shook the fragments out of her palm and let them fall to the ground. But when she brushed away more dirt, she found more glass bits everywhere, a layer of the stuff beneath the ground.
Experimentally she pushed herself to her knees, straightened upher ears rang with dizziness, but she wasnt going to faintand then, one foot, two, she stood up. Now she could see the landscape better. It was just a plain, a plain of this glass-ridden sand, that marched away to the horizon, where worn hills waited out eternity. She and Josh were at the base of a shallow depression; the land subtly rose all around them to a rim, no more than a few meters high, perhaps a kilometer away.
She was standing in a crater.
A nuke would do this, she thought. The glass fragments could have been formed in the explosion of a small nuclear weapon, bits of concrete and soil fused to glass. If that was so, nothing else was leftif there had been a city here there were no concrete foundations, no bones, not even the ashes of the final fires, only the fragments of nuclear glass. This crater looked old, worn, the bits of glass buried deep. If war had come by here, it must have been long ago.
She wondered if radioactivity lingered. But if the Firstborn had meant her any harm they could have simply killed herand if not, surely they would protect her from such an elementary hazard.
Her chest ached as she breathed. Was the air thin? Was there too little oxygen, or too much?
Suddenly it got a little darker, though there was no cloud in the ruddy sky. She peered up. There was something wrong with the sun. Its disc was deformed. It looked like a leaf out of which a great bite had been taken.
Josh was standing beside her. My God, he said.
The eclipse progressed quickly. It began to feel colder, and in the last moments Bisesa glimpsed bands of shadow rushing across the eroded ground. She felt her breathing slow, her heart pump more gently. Her body, responding even now to ancient primal rhythms, was reacting to the darkness, readying itself for night.
The darkness reached its greatest depth. There was a moment of profound stillness.
The sun turned to a ring of brightness. The central disc of shadow had a serrated edge, and sunlight twinkled through those irregularities. That disc was surely the Moon, still traveling between Earth and sun, its shadow sliding across the face of the sun. The suns glare was reduced enough for Bisesa to make out the corona, the suns higher atmosphere, easily visible as a wispy sculpture around that complex double disc.
But this eclipse was not total. The Moon was not big enough to obscure that glowing face. The fat ring of light in the sky was a baffling, terrifying sight.
Somethings wrong, Josh murmured.
Geometry, she said. The Earth-Moon system It changes with time. As the Moon dragged tides through Earths ocean, so Earth likewise tugged at the Moons rocky substrate. Since their formation the twin worlds had slowly separatedonly a few centimeters per year, but over enough time that took the Moon ever farther from the Earth.
Josh understood the essence of what had happened. This is the future. Not the twenty-first centurythe very far future Millions of years hence, perhaps.
She walked around the plain, peering up at the complex sky. Youre trying to tell us something, arent you? This desolate, war-shattered groundwhere am I, London? New York, Moscow, Beijing? Lahore? And why bring us to this precise place and time to show us an eclipse? Has all this got something to do with the sun? Hot, dusty, thirsty, disoriented, she was suddenly filled with rage. Dont give me special-effect riddles. Talk to me, damn you. Whats going to happen?
As if in reply an Eye, at least as large as the Eye of Marduk, snapped into existence above her head. She actually felt the wash of the air it displaced as it forced its way into her reality.
She took Joshs hand. Here we go again Keep your hands inside the car at all times.
But his eyes were wide; sand clung to his sweat-streaked face. Bisesa?
She understood immediately. He couldnt see the Eye. This time it had come for herher alone, not for Josh.
No! She grabbed Joshs arm. You cant do this, you cruel bastards!
Josh understood. Bisesa, its all right. He touched her chin, turned her face toward him, kissed her mouth. Weve already come further than I could have dreamed possible. Perhaps our love will live on, in some other worldand perhaps when all possibilities are drawn together at the end of time we will be reunited He smiled. Its enough.
In the sky the Eye flipped into a funnel shape, and then a corridor in the sky. Already sparks of light were rushing across the plain, gathering around her, hurtling upward.
She clung to Josh and closed her eyes. Listen to me. Ive done everything you asked. Give me this one thing. Dont leave him here, to die alone. Send him homesend him back to Abdi. This one thing, I beg you
A hot wind gathered, rushing up from the ground into the mouth of the shining shaft overhead. Something tugged at her, pulling her from Joshs arms. She struggled, but Josh let go.
She was lifted off the ground. She was actually looking down at him.
He was still smiling. You are an angel ascending. Good-bye, good-bye The searing, beautiful light gathered around her again. In the last instant she saw him stagger back into a room crowded with wires and bits of electronic gear, where a dark man rushed forward to catch him.
Thank you.
A clash of cymbals.
46. Grasper
With the coming of the morning, Seeker woke with a start, eyes snapping open.
For the first time in years there was no net sheltering her from the sky. She cried out and curled over her daughter.
She forced open one eye. There was still no net, nothing but bare ground around her, a few scuff marks and tracks. The soldiers had gone. They had taken away the cage.
She was free.
She sat up. Grasper woke up with a grumble and rubbed her eyes. Seeker looked around. The rocky plain swept away, bare of life save for a few tussocks of grass. In the distance, snow-capped mountains loomed over the horizon, blue and floating in the morning mist. Near the base of the mountains she made out a stripe of green. Her old spirit stirred. Forest: if they could make it that far, perhaps she would find others like herself.
But the breeze changed, coming from the north, and she tasted ice. She quailed. Suddenly she longed for the smells of cooking, the clattering of machines, the high, gull-like voices of the soldiers. She had spent too long in her cage; she missed it.
Grasper, though, shared none of her mothers hesitation. She knuckle-walked forward, chimp-like, exploring the rocky ground. It seemed rich in texture compared to the swept-bare, stamped-down dirt floor of the cage. Here was a rock that fit neatly in her hand, there a dry reed that folded and bent and twisted with ease.
Clutching the rock, Grasper unfolded her legs and stood upright. She peered across the broken ground toward the mountains, and the ice.
In the north the cold was gathering. The new volcanic island in the Atlantic had deflected the Gulf Stream, the flow of southern water that had kept northern Europe anomalously warm for millennia. The Gulf Streams loss had already had impacts on agriculture as far south as Babylonia. Now it was going to get worse. This year, autumn would come early, and by midwinter, massive Arctic superstorms would erupt with fury over the continents, depositing more snow in a few days than would once have been seen in five or ten years.
For two million years before the Discontinuity, the ice had come and gone from its fastnesses at the poles, its complex cycles governed by subtleties of Earths passage around the sun. This new world, Mir, thrown together from fragments of the old, had at first oscillated unsteadily, but as that first motion damped it was settling down to a new pattern of cycles: a pattern that, in the short term, promoted the spreading of the ice. It would take only a decade for the ice caps to form, a decade more for them to extend as far south as the sites of London, Berlin, Manhattan.