Time’s Eye

At the next rest stop, she took a look at the weal on Ruddy’s cheek, what he called his “Lahore sore.” He thought it had been caused by an ant bite, and it had not responded to his doctor’s prescription of cocaine. Bisesa knew only a little field medicine, but she thought this looked like Leishmania, an affliction caused by a parasite transmitted by sandflies. She treated it with the contents of her med kit. It soon began to clear up. Ruddy would say later that this small incident had convinced him more than anything else, even Bisesa’s spectacular arrival in a crashing helicopter, that she really was from the future.

***

About four o’clock, Batson called a halt.

In the lee of a hill the troops began assembling the evening’s campsite. They piled up their weapons, took off their equipment and boots, and pulled on the chaplies— sandals—they had been carrying in their packs. They passed out small shovels, and everybody, including Josh, Bisesa and Ruddy, set to building a low perimeter wall from loose rubble, and digging out sleeping pits. All of this was for protection against opportunistic attacks by Pashtuns, though they had still seen no Pashtuns that day. It was hard work after a day’s march, but after about an hour it was done. Bisesa volunteered for “stag,” which, Josh worked out, meant sentry duty. Batson was polite enough, but refused.

They settled down for some food: just boiled meat and rice, but appetizing to them all after the long day. Josh made sure he was close to Bisesa. She added little tablets to her food and “Puritabs” to her water, which she said should protect her from infections from the water and the like; her supply of these twenty-first-century miracles wouldn’t last forever, but perhaps long enough to let her system acclimatize—or so she hoped.

She curled up in her pit under her own lightweight poncho, with her belt kit wrapped up as a pillow. She took out a little sky-blue device she called her “phone,” and set it up on the ground before her. Somehow it didn’t seem surprising when the little toy spoke to her. “Music, Bisesa?”

“Something distracting.”

Music poured out of the little machine, loud and vibrant. The troops stared, and Batson snapped, “For God’s sake turn it down!” Bisesa complied, but let the music play on quietly.

Ruddy had theatrically clamped his hands over his ears. “By all the gods! What barbarity is that?”

Bisesa laughed. “Come on, Ruddy. It’s an orchestral reworking of a few classic gangsta rap anthems. It’s decades old—grandmother music!”

Ruddy harrumphed like a fifty-year-old. “I find it impossible to believe that Europeans will ever be seduced by such rhythms.” And, pointedly, he picked up his blanket and made for the furthest corner of the little compound.

Josh was left alone with Bisesa. “Of course he likes you, you know.”

“Ruddy?”

“It’s happened before—he is drawn to strong older women—there’s a pattern to it. Perhaps he will select you as one of his muses, as he calls them. And perhaps, even if his destiny is now in flux, this startling experience will provide such an imaginative man with new creative directions.”

“I think he did write some futuristic fiction, in his old history.”

“More might be gained than is lost, then …”

She toyed with her phone, listening to her strange music, with an expression softened by what he took to be a kind of reverse nostalgia, a nostalgia for the future. He essayed, “Does your daughter like this music?”

“When she was small,” Bisesa said. “We’d dance to it together. But she’s too grown up for it now, all of eight years old. She likes the new synth stars—entirely generated by computer, ah, by machines. Little girls like their idols to be safe, you see, and what’s safer than a simulation?”

He understood little of this, but he was charmed by another glimpse of a culture he could barely understand. He said cautiously, “There must be somebody else you miss—back on the other side.”

She looked at him directly, her eyes shadowed, and he realized to his chagrin that she knew exactly what he was fishing for. “I’ve been single for a while, Josh. Myra’s father died, and there’s been nobody else.” She rested her head on her arm. “You know, apart from Myra it’s not people I’m missing so much as the texture. This little phone should connect me to the world, the whole planet. On every surface there is animation—ads, news, music, color—twenty-four hours a day. It’s a constant rush of information.”

“It sounds clamorous.”

“Perhaps it is. But I’m used to it.”

“There are pleasures to be had here. Breathe … Can you smell it? The touch of frost already in the air … The burning of the fire—you’ll soon learn to tell one wood from another purely by the scent of its smoke, you know …”

“Something else too,” she murmured. “A musk. Like a zoo. There are animals out here. Animals that shouldn’t be here, even in your time.”