Time’s Eye

After three months of living in such close quarters, Kolya had come to understand Sable, he thought. Aged forty, Sable came from a poor New Orleans family with a complicated genetic history. Some of the Russians who had served with her admired the strength of character that had taken her so far—even now, in NASA’s Astronaut Office, to be anything other than male and WASP was a disadvantage. Other cosmonauts, less charitable, joked about how launch weight manifests had to be recalculated if Sable was onboard, on account of the immense chip she carried on her shoulder. Most agreed that if she had been Russian she would never have passed the psychological tests required for every cosmonaut to prove suitable for space duty.

During the three-month tour on Station, Kolya himself had gotten on fairly well with Sable, perhaps because they were opposite types. Kolya was a serving Air Force officer, and he had a young family in Moscow. To him, spaceflight was an adventure, but what drove him were loyalty to his family and duty to his country, and he was content to let his career develop where it would. Kolya recognized a fierce, burning ambition in Sable, which would not be satisfied, surely, until she had reached the pinnacles of her profession: command of Clavius Base, or perhaps even a seat on a Mars flight. Perhaps Sable had seen Kolya as no threat to her own glittering progress.

But he had learned to be wary of her. And now, in this awkward, frightening situation, he waited for her to explode.

Musa clapped his gloved hands together, taking command. “I think it is obvious we won’t be proceeding to reentry just yet. We should not worry. In the olden days Soviet craft would only have contact with their ground controllers for twenty minutes of every ninety-minute orbit, and so the Soyuz was designed to function independently—”

“Maybe the fault isn’t with us,” Sable said. “What if it’s on the ground?”

Musa scoffed. “What fault could possibly take out a whole chain of ground stations?”

“A war,” said Kolya.

Musa said firmly, “Such speculation is useless. In time, whatever the fault, the ground will reestablish contact, and we will return to our flight plan. All we have to do is wait. But in the meantime we have work to do.” He rummaged under his seat for a copy of the on-orbit checklist.

He was right, Kolya realized; the little ship wouldn’t run itself, and if it was to be stuck up here in orbit for one more revolution—or two, or three?—its crew would have to help it function. Was the compartment’s pressure appropriate, was the mixture of gases correct? Was the ship rotating properly as it followed the great curve of its orbit, so that its solar panels tracked the sun? All these things had to be ensured.

Soon the three of them had settled into a familiar, and somehow reassuring, routine of checks—as if, after all, they were in control of their destiny, Kolya thought.

But the fact was that everything had changed, and it couldn’t be ignored.

The Soyuz was floating into the shadow of the planet again. Kolya peered through his window, looking for the orange-yellow glow of cities, hoping for reassurance. But the land was dark.

9. Paradox

Josh was intrigued by this woman from the future—if that was what she was! Bisesa’s face was handsome and well proportioned, if not beautiful, her nose strong and her jaw square; but her eyes were clear, her cut-short hair lustrous. She had a strength about her, even physically, that he had seen in no woman before: faced with this unprecedented situation, she was confident, if edgy with fatigue.

As the evening wore on, he took to following her around, puppylike.

It had been a long day—the longest of Bisesa’s life, she said, even if she had lost a few hours—and Captain Grove’s advice that the newcomers should be allowed to eat and rest seemed wise. But they insisted they had work to do before resting. Abdikadir wanted to check on Casey, the other pilot. And he wanted to return to the machine they called their “Little Bird.” “I have to erase the memory banks of the electronic gear,” he said. “There’s sensitive data in there, especially the avionics …” Josh was entranced by this talk of intelligent machines, and he imagined the air full of invisible telegraph wires, transmitting mysterious and important messages hither and yon.

Grove was inclined to allow the request. “I can’t see how we can be harmed by allowing the destruction of what I don’t understand anyhow,” he said dryly. “And besides—you say it is your duty, Warrant Officer. I respect that. Time and space may flow like toffee, but duty endures.”

For her part Bisesa wanted to retrace the track her helicopter had taken, she said, before the crash. “We were shot down. I think that was just after we noticed the sun dancing around the sky. So—you see? If we’ve somehow come through some, some barrier in time, then whoever shot at us must be on this side too …”