Time’s Eye

She smiled. “I wouldn’t call it a city. But you can see its light, like a captured star, the only one in the circle of the crescent Moon. Now it’s gone. That isn’t even my Moon. There is a crew on Mars, and a second on the way—or there was. I wonder what’s become of them …”

There was a grunt of disgust. One of the soldiers had been rooting at the bottom of the foxhole, and now emerged with what looked like a piece of meat, still dripping blood. The stink was sharp.

“A human arm,” Ruddy said flatly. He turned away and vomited.

Josh said, “It looks to me like the work of a great cat … It seems that whoever attacked you did not live long to enjoy his triumph.”

“I suppose he was as lost as I am.”

“Yes. I apologize for Ruddy. He doesn’t have a very strong stomach for such sights.”

“No. And he never will.”

Josh looked at her; her eyes were full of moonlight, her expression empty. “What do you mean?”

“He was right. I do know who he is. You’re Rudyard Kipling, aren’t you? Rudyard bloody Kipling. My God, what a day.”

Ruddy didn’t respond. He was hunched over, still retching, and bile stained his chin.

At that moment the ground trembled, hard enough to raise little clouds of dust everywhere, like invisible footfalls. And rain began to fall, from thick black clouds that came racing across the Moon’s empty face.

Part 2 Castaways in Time

10. Geometry

For Bisesa the first morning was the worst.

She suspected that some combination of adrenaline and shock had kept her going through the day of what they were starting to call the Discontinuity. But that night, in the room given to them by Grove, a hastily converted storeroom, she had slept badly on her thin down-stuffed mattress. By the next morning, when she had reluctantly woken up to find herself still here, she had come crashing down from her adrenaline high, and felt inconsolable. The second night, at Abdi’s insistence, desperate for sleep, she cracked her survival gear. She donned earplugs and eye shades, swallowed a Halcyon tablet—what Casey called a “Blue Bomber”—and slept for ten hours.

But as the days passed, Bisesa, Abdikadir and Casey were still stuck here in the Jamrud fort. They had no contact on any of their military wavelengths, Bisesa’s phone muttered about its continuing cauterization, no SAR teams came flapping out of the UN base in response to their patiently bleeping beacons—there was no medevac for Casey. And there was not a single contrail to be seen in the sky, not one.

She spent most of her time missing Myra, her daughter. She didn’t even want to confront those feelings, as if acknowledging them would make her separation from Myra real. She longed to have something to do—anything to stop her thinking.

Meanwhile life went on.

After the first couple of days, when it was obvious the Bird crew had no hostile intent, the British troops’ close military scrutiny of them was relaxed a little, though Bisesa suspected Captain Grove was too wary a commander not to keep a weathered eye on them. They certainly weren’t allowed anywhere near the small stash of twenty-first-century pistols, submachine guns, flares and the like that had been extracted from the Bird. But she thought it probably helped these nineteenth-century British accept them that Casey was a white American and that both Bisesa and Abdi could be regarded as belonging to “allied” races. If the Bird’s crew had been Russian, German or Chinese, say—and there were plenty of such troops in Clavius—there might have been more hostility.

But when she thought about it Bisesa was astonished even to be considering such issues, culture clashes spanning the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The whole business was surreal; she felt as if she was walking around in a bubble. And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps across a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.

Abdikadir said, “I don’t think the British understand all this at all, and maybe we understand too well. When H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895—ten years ahead in this time zone!—he had to spend twenty or thirty pages explaining what a time machine does. Not how it works, you see, but just what it is. For us there has been a process of acculturation. After a century of science fiction you and I are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of time travel, and can immediately accept its implications—strange though the experience is to actually live through.”

“But that doesn’t apply to these Victorian-age Brits. To them a Model T Ford would be a fabulous vehicle from the future.”