Time’s Eye

“Nearly, I suppose. I check it every morning.”

Abdikadir lifted his wrist and glanced at his watch. “And yet I show only fifteen twenty-seven—half past three in the afternoon. Bisesa, do you agree?”

She checked. “Yes.”

Ruddy frowned. He strode over to Abdikadir and took his wrist. “I’ve never seen a watch like this. It’s certainly not a Waterbury! It has numbers, not hands. There isn’t even a dial. And the numbers melt one into the other!”

“It’s a digital watch,” Abdikadir said mildly.

“And—what is this?” Ruddy called out the numbers. “Eight six 2037 …”

“That is the date,” Abdikadir said.

Ruddy frowned, working it out. “A date in the twenty-first century?”

“Yes.”

Ruddy strode over to Grove’s desk and rummaged in a heap of papers there. “Forgive me, Captain.” Even the formidable Grove seemed out of his depth; he raised his hands helplessly. Ruddy extracted a newspaper. “A couple of days old, but it will do.” He held it up for Bisesa and Abdikadir to see; it was a thin rag called the Civil and Military Gazette and Pioneer. “Can you see the date?”

It was a date in March 1885. There was a long, frozen silence.

Grove said briskly, “Do you know, I think we could all do with a cup of tea.”

“No!” The other young man, Josh White, seemed very agitated. “I’m sorry sir, but it all makes sense now—I think it does—oh, it fits, it fits!”

“Calm yourself,” Grove said sternly. “What are you jabbering about?”

“The man-ape,” White said. “Never mind cups of tea—we must show them the man-ape!”

So, with Bisesa and Abdikadir still under armed guard, they all trooped out of the fort.

***

They came to a kind of encampment a hundred meters or so from the fortress wall. Here a conical tent of netting had been erected. A group of soldiers stood casually around, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes. Lean, grimy, the backs of their necks shaven, the troops gazed at Abdikadir and Bisesa with the usual mixture of curiosity and lust.

Something was moving inside the netting, Bisesa saw—something alive, an animal perhaps—but the setting sun had touched the horizon, and the light was too low, the shadows too long for her to make it out.

At White’s command, the netting was pulled back. Bisesa had been expecting to see a supporting pole. Instead, a silvery sphere, apparently floating unsupported in the air, had provided the tent’s apex. None of the locals gave the sphere a second glance. Abdikadir stepped forward, squinted at his reflection in the floating sphere, and passed his hand underneath it. There was nothing holding the sphere up. “You know,” he said, “on any other day this would seem unusual.”

Bisesa’s gaze was drawn to the floating anomaly, to her own distorted face reflected in its surface. This is the key, she thought, the notion bursting without warning into her mind.

Josh touched her arm. “Bisesa, are you all right?”

Bisesa was distracted by his accent, which sounded to her ears JFK-Bostonian, but his face seemed to show genuine concern. She laughed without humor. “In the circumstances, I think I’m doing pretty well.”

“You’re missing the show …” He meant the creatures on the ground, and she tried to focus.

At first Bisesa thought they were chimps, but of light, almost gracile build. Bonobos, perhaps. One was small, the other larger; the big one cradled the little one. At a gesture from Grove, two squaddies stepped forward and pulled the baby away, grabbed the mother’s wrists and ankles, and stretched her out on the ground. The creature kicked and spat.

The “chimp” was a biped.

“Holy shit,” Bisesa murmured. “Do you think that’s an australopithecine?”

“A Lucy, yes,” Abdikadir murmured. “But the pithecines have been extinct for—what? A million years?”

“Is it possible a band of them have somehow survived in the wild, in the mountains maybe—”

He looked at her, his eyes wells of darkness. “You don’t believe that.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You see?” White shouted excitedly. “You see the man-ape? What is this but another— time slip ?”

Bisesa stepped forward, and peered into the haunting eyes of the older pithecine. She was straining to reach the child, she saw. “I wonder what she’s thinking.”

Abdikadir grunted. “‘There goes the neighborhood.’ ”

8. On Orbit

After hours of fruitless calling, Musa sat back in his couch.

The three cosmonauts lay side by side, like huge orange bugs in their spacesuits. For once the coziness of the Soyuz capsule, the way they were pressed against each other, was comforting rather than confining.

“I don’t understand it,” Musa said.

“You said that already,” Sable murmured.

There was a grim silence. Since the moment they had lost contact, the atmosphere between them had been explosive.