Time’s Eye

He reached out impulsively and took her hand. “We’re safe here,” he said. She neither responded nor drew back, and after a while, unsure, he pulled his hand away. “I’m a city boy,” he said. “Boston-born. So all this—the openness—is new to me too.”

“What brought you here?”

“Nothing planned. I was always curious, you know—always wanted to see what was around the corner, on the next block. I kept volunteering for one crazy assignment after another, until I landed up here, at the ends of the earth.”

“Oh, you’ve gone rather farther than that, Josh. But I think you’re just the type to cope with our strange adventure.” She was watching him, a hint of humor in her eyes—toying with him, perhaps.

He continued doggedly, “You don’t seem much like the soldiers I know.”

She yawned. “My parents were farmers. They owned a big eco-friendly spread in Cheshire. I was an only child. The farm was going to be mine to work and develop—I loved that place. But when I was sixteen my father sold it out from under me. I suppose he thought I was never serious about running it.”

“But you were.”

“Yes. I’d even applied for a place at agricultural college. It caused a rift, or maybe showed one up. I wanted to get away. I moved to London. Then, as soon as I was old enough, I joined up. Of course I had no idea what the army would be like—the PT, the drill, the weapons, the field craft—but I took to it.”

“I don’t see you as a killer,” he said. “But that’s what soldiers do.”

“Not in my day,” she said. “Not in the British army anyhow. Peacekeeping: that’s what we go out in the world for. Of course sometimes you have to kill—or even wage war to keep the peace—and that’s a whole other set of issues.”

He lay back, staring at the stars. “It’s strange to hear you speak of your troubles with your family, failed communication, lost ambitions. I tend to imagine, when I think of it, that the people of a hundred and fifty years hence will be too wise for that—too evolved, as Professor Darwin would say!”

“Oh, I don’t think we’re very evolved, Josh. But we’re getting smarter about some things. Religion, for instance. Take Abdikadir and Casey. Devout Muslim and jock Christian, you’d think they are as far apart as can be. But they are both Oikumens.”

“That word is from the Greek—like ecumenical?”

“Yes. Over the last few decades we’ve been close to an all-out conflict between Christianity and Islam. If you take a long view, it’s absurd; both religions have deep common roots, and both are basically creeds of peace. But all the high-level attempts at reconciliation, conferences of bishops and mullahs, came to nothing. The Oikumens are a grassroots movement trying to achieve what all the top-level contact has failed to do. They are so low-profile they are almost underground, but they’re there, burrowing away.”

This talk made him realize how remote in time her age was, and how little he could understand of it. He said cautiously, “And has God been banished in your day, as some thinkers would predict?”

She hesitated. “Not banished, Josh. But we understand ourselves better than we used to. We understand why we need gods. There are some in my time who see all religion as a psychopathology. They point to those who are prepared to torture and kill their coreligionists, for the sake of a few percent difference in obscure ideology. But there are others who say that for all their flaws the religions are attempts to address the most basic questions about existence. Even if they tell us nothing about God, they’re surely telling us a great deal about what it means to be human. The Oikumens hope that by unifying religions, the result won’t be a dilution but an enrichment—like the ability to study a precious gem from many angles. And maybe these tentative steps are our best hope of a true enlightenment in the future.”

“It sounds utopian. And is it working?”

“Slowly, like the peacekeeping. If we’re building a utopia we’re doing it in the dark. But we’re trying, I guess.”

“It’s a beautiful vision,” he breathed. “The future must be a marvelous place.” He turned to her. “How strange all this is. How exhilarating—to be here with you—to be castaways in time, together! …”

She reached out and touched his lips with one fingertip. “Goodnight, Josh.” She rolled away, pulled her poncho over her body, and curled up.

He lay down, his pulse thumping.

***

The next day the ground rose steadily, becoming broken and lifeless. The clear air thinned and grew colder, bitterly cold when the wind from the north blew, despite the brightness of the sun. By now it was obvious there was no threat from Pashtuns or anybody else, and Batson allowed the troops to abandon the slow routine of picketing and march more briskly.